‘The attorney wouldn’t say,’ Stone said. ‘I badgered him about it, because I wanted to know too. Finally, after McCord hanged himself, the attorney said that he’d planned to expose his suppliers to get his charges knocked down from possession of child porn to pandering.’
Scarlett blinked. ‘Pandering? Really? I mean, it’s a lower minimum sentence than for child porn possession so that’s why he’d want it, but pandering carries with it an economic element. Was he copping to prostitution? Would a judge even allow that?’
Stone shrugged. ‘That’s all the attorney would tell me.’
Scarlett found the attorney’s name in Stone’s story and used her phone to look him up online. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘We won’t be following up with him. He’s dead.’
Marcus leaned over her shoulder to read along with her. ‘Died in an office fire. Arson was suspected.’
‘Tidy,’ Scarlett said grimly. ‘Dammit. McCord said he was going to expose his suppliers, and all of a sudden anyone who can tell us what he was going to divulge and against whom is dead.’ She put the papers down, spoke aloud the thought that had been circling in her mind since they’d left the hotel. ‘Demetrius supplied the Bautistas to Chip Anders for labor. Maybe he supplied children to McCord for—’
‘God knows what,’ Marcus said from behind clenched teeth.
Scarlett squeezed his knee again, for support. And comfort. Because now she understood his zeal to punish monsters who hurt children. ‘Let’s take a look at the files you saved, Diesel. You say they’re at your house? We can follow you there.’
‘I’ll go home and get them and bring them to you,’ Diesel said.
Scarlett wanted to argue, but there was a sudden undercurrent in the room, a tension that she could feel but that she didn’t understand. She squeezed Marcus’s knee again, so lightly that no one else would know.
‘We don’t have that much time,’ Marcus said to Diesel, apology in his voice. ‘We’re headed to the Meadow next. It’s a shelter on Race Street.’
‘I know it,’ Diesel said stiffly. ‘I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.’
They dispersed, Scarlett holding her question until she and Marcus were alone in his office with the door closed. ‘I didn’t mean to upset him,’ she said. ‘What did I say?’
He covered her shoulders with his hands and massaged. ‘Nothing wrong. It’s just Diesel being fucked in the head. He doesn’t like letting people in his house. I’ve only been there a few times myself.’ He leaned in until their foreheads touched. ‘I’m afraid to see what he brings us.’
‘I know. I couldn’t push either of them any further to tell us more. They . . .’ She swallowed hard. Thought of what Marcus had told her about Stone, and all the things he hadn’t put into words. She’d seen the pain in Stone’s eyes, the understanding where there should have been none. Diesel had exhibited that same deer-in-the-headlights panic. ‘Diesel too?’
‘I don’t know. He’s never told me. I never asked.’ He straightened, kissed the top of her head. ‘Let’s go, or he’ll get to the shelter before we do. He doesn’t live far.’ He pulled a battered old laptop from a lower desk drawer and slid it into his computer bag.
‘What’s with the old-style laptop?’ she asked.
‘It has no internet card. Has no WiFi or even Ethernet cable capability. I use it when I either don’t want any chance of someone hacking into my system or when I’m unsure of the file source. I don’t want to corrupt the entire Ledger server if I open a contaminated file.’
‘Diesel taught you that?’
‘I knew it myself. I’m moderately skilled with systems, but Diesel is an artist.’ He shouldered the bag, then came back to her for a kiss that took her breath away. ‘For courage,’ he murmured.
‘Mine or yours?’
‘Ours.’
Thirty-two
Cincinnati, Ohio
Wednesday 5 August, 4.30 P.M.
‘I haven’t been to the Meadow in years,’ Marcus murmured from the passenger seat of Scarlett’s department car, his gaze fixed on the roofline as they approached the shelter. This time of day, he might catch a glint of sunlight off the barrel of a rifle, giving them a split-second warning. Sometimes a split second was all a person needed.
Scarlett’s gaze was fixed ahead as she drove, searching every shadow and suspicious movement in the ground-floor windows. ‘You’ve been to the shelter?’ she asked, and he knew he’d surprised her.
The Lorelle E. Meadows shelter had been around for as long as Marcus could remember. Located in the part of the neighborhood that had not yet been gentrified, it was sandwiched between two buildings with windows that had been boarded up even when he was a kid.
‘Many times. Jeremy would bring Stone and me down here on Saturdays to help in the soup kitchen while he worked the clinic. I was twelve or so, Stone ten when we started. We were regular volunteers for years. Of course we were the only volunteers with our own bodyguards,’ he added wryly. ‘Mom insisted.’
‘I understand why.’
‘So did Jeremy. He’d bring Sammy with us.’
‘Sammy was Jeremy’s first partner, right? Stone mentioned him to Deacon and me when we were interviewing him last November. He said that Sammy died in the car wreck that burned Jeremy’s hands. And that later Jeremy married Keith, that they’d been friends since high school.’
Marcus nodded, pleased that she’d remembered his family’s history, odd as it was. ‘Yeah. We didn’t know that Sammy and Jeremy were lovers at the time. We just thought they were friends. And that Jeremy trusted him to keep us safe.’ His lips curved sadly. ‘I don’t think Jeremy’s been down here since Sammy died. He was so lost, he kind of drifted for a while.’
‘That’s when Mikhail was conceived?’
‘Yeah. That Jeremy was Mikhail’s biological father was something only Mom knew until last fall, when Mikhail found out the truth. Even Jeremy hadn’t known.’ Even though he’d understood her reasons, her actions had made Marcus want to shake his mother for not allowing Jeremy to know his son. And Mikhail to know his father. It was damn sad. His mother had kept it secret because she was afraid of Keith, afraid he would take it out on Mikhail if he found out that Jeremy had . . . taken comfort from her while grieving Sammy.
Too damn sad. ‘I often wonder how things would have been different if Jeremy had been allowed to be Mikhail’s father from day one. I mean, he always treated him like he treated us when he came to visit – like his own son. Ironic, because Mick was the only one of us brothers who really was his.’
‘What do you mean? How things would have been different?’
‘Jeremy did things with us every day. He was our dad. He made sure we ate our veggies and did our homework and never, ever forgot that having wealth was a privilege. He made sure we knew what it meant to give back to the community. Mikhail didn’t get that. I got out of the army when he was twelve and couldn’t believe what a brat he’d become. A spoiled brat. So I did with him what Jeremy had done with us.’
Her voice softened. ‘You became his father figure. I didn’t realize you were so close.’
Marcus nodded, his throat growing thick. ‘The last five years, yes. I made him deliver papers for the Ledger and made sure he had a curfew, even though he had a bodyguard. I played ball with him and checked his homework. And when Diesel was building affordable housing, I put Mickey’s rich ass to work. He whined at first, but he really enjoyed it.’ His lips curved on a good memory. ‘Especially when he started to see muscle tone, because “the chicks” dug it.’ He drew a breath and let it out, the good memory fleeting, a painful one taking its place. ‘Mom was smothering him to death with bodyguards. He never got a second to himself. He was like a pacing cat in the zoo. I was the one who convinced Mom to give him some freedom, to get him a car when he turned sixteen.’ He closed his eyes, made his mouth utter the words. ‘When he ran away, I felt responsible. He picked up his friend and drove to the cabin, then gave his friend the car keys and told him to come back in a week and get him.’