I was beginning to feel bad about coming.
The aide got the oxygen line below Mrs. Edgerton’s nose and then snarled at us, “Can’t you come back? She had a stroke three weeks ago. It damaged her vision, and she gets anxious.”
Now I felt really bad, but I said to Mahoney, “Tell her exactly why we came.”
Mrs. Edgerton’s head cocked and swiveled toward me. “Who else is here?”
Mahoney said, “A consultant, ma’am. But back to why we’re here. The kidnapped woman’s husband paid her ransom in what’s called a cryptocurrency.”
“I know what that is, blockchain nonsense,” she snapped. “So what?”
Before Mahoney could answer, Mrs. Edgerton waved her shaky left hand in my direction. “You answer. Consultant.”
“Mrs. Edgerton,” Ned said. “I am in charge here.”
“I don’t care,” she said, wheeling six or seven inches toward me. “I may be legally blind now, but I still have most of my hearing, my rights, and my wits about me. Mr. Consultant, tell me why you and the special agent are really here.”
I cleared my throat and said, “The ransom money moved through hundreds of digital accounts all over the world and ended up in your personal cryptocurrency account. It landed there yesterday. All five million.”
It was as if she hadn’t heard. After I’d said about ten words, Mrs. Edgerton gripped the handles of her chair so hard, her knuckles turned pearly, and her face contorted into something bitter and vindictive.
“You’re here to finish me off, aren’t you, Cross?”
I hesitated, then said, “No, Mrs. Edgerton, I’m not.”
She chortled at that. “Sure you are. You railroaded my son into that electric chair, and you’d like nothing better than to see me fry too.”
“We’re here about a completely different matter,” Mahoney said. “Mrs. Edgerton, we have a federal warrant to seize any and all computers from your home and the Edgerton family office in Manhattan.”
The old woman seemed not to hear. She strained forward in her wheelchair, looking as angry as she’d been when her son was executed.
In a harsh, cold whisper she said, “I told you that you would burn in hell, Cross. Do you remember that?”
“I do. Are you M, Mrs. Edgerton?”
“Don’t answer that!” a man behind us roared. “Mom, do not say another damned word, and you two are out of here. I don’t care if you are FBI. You don’t barge into my invalid mother’s house and start asking her questions without counsel.”
We’d both turned to see a bull of a man in his fifties coming at us across the kitchen. He was balding, fit, and wearing a hooded sweatshirt and workout gear. I remembered him from the execution.
“Peter Edgerton?” Mahoney said. “We have a warrant for your house too.”
That stopped Mrs. Edgerton’s older son in his tracks. “My house? For what? And what the hell do you think you’re going to find in my mother’s computers? She hasn’t used one since the stroke!”
“Ransom money demanded by kidnappers ended up in your mother’s crypto account,” Mahoney said.
“Pete!” Mrs. Edgerton shouted. “I don’t even have an account like that.”
“Yes, you do, Mom,” her son said sharply.
“What?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. He studied us. “Are you bullshitting me? Did that crypto really go into her specific account?”
“It did.”
“Then someone out there hacked it and sent it there, the real kidnappers.”
“What would be the point of that?” I asked.
Peter Edgerton seemed to notice me for the first time, and his entire demeanor changed.
“No way,” he said. He looked at Mahoney. “You get this son of a bitch out of my mother’s house or I promise you, I’ll spend every dime of my personal crypto fortune to sue you both into oblivion.”
“Mr. Edgerton,” Mahoney said.
“Get him out of my house, Pete!” his mother shouted.
Her son struggled to control himself as he glared at Mahoney. “If Cross goes, out of here completely, off the property, we’ll co-operate, let you look at my house, my brother’s place, the family office, whatever. I promise you we’re not involved.”
Mahoney looked at me and gestured with his head toward the door.
I left without argument. I heard Pete Edgerton say in a soothing voice, “He’s gone, Mom. He’s never coming back.”
I was heading toward the front door when his mother shouted, “You’re still going to burn, Cross! No matter what you do, you’re still going to burn for what you did to Mikey!”
Chapter 81
As I walked down the driveway toward the gate, I decided there wasn’t any point in my sticking around outside while Mahoney and his men conducted the search.
And I was having serious doubts that Mrs. Edgerton was physically capable of being M. Her brain seemed largely intact, but the stroke had left her all but blind, and she had serious respiratory issues.
Pete?
Now, that was a real possibility. Pete had the motivation to be M. He also had the money, and at least part of it was in largely untraceable cryptocurrency.
Or was there a conspiracy between mother and son? If it was a shared obsession, two hearts loathing as one, I could almost wrap my head around the Edgertons’ putting revenge ahead of their personal fortunes, lives, and freedom.
Almost.
My doubts all stemmed from one question: Why would they be involved in a kidnapping in Ohio?
No answer I could come up with made sense. I walked through the gate and pulled out my phone to request an Uber to take me back into the city.
My phone buzzed in my hand. A text from FBI Special Agent Kim Tillis:
Going to Alexandria detention center at noon to tell Marty. See you there to deliver good news for a change?
It was ten past eleven, so I texted back: I will be there.
An innocent man freed. The thought made me smile in a way that putting the cuffs on someone guilty did not. This felt lighter, selfless, not like atoning for the dead at all.
That feeling was still building when I got out of the Uber at the appointed hour and spotted Agent Tillis beside a younger, chipper-looking woman in a navy-blue suit.
Sandra Wendover smiled and shook my hand after Tillis introduced her as an attorney with the federal public defenders’ office.
“I’m so happy, Dr. Cross,” Wendover said, still smiling. “We don’t often get to make this kind of visit to an inmate.”
I grinned back. “It does feel good.”
Tillis teared up. “It’s like we’re bringing Marty the best present ever.”
We went through the doors to the security checkpoint. I got out my identification and was ready to pass my shoes through the scanner when a woman called out, “Dr. Cross?”
I looked up to see Estella Maines, the sheriff’s deputy.
“Did you get the message I sent over your way Friday?” she asked.
“My way?”
“To Metro PD.”
“Oh, I’m only a consultant there these days.”
“Well, the fingerprints you asked us to take of Dirty Marty’s visitor? The guy in the stills from the security feed? We got a hit. He’s an ex-con. We got him cold.”
My heart raced. Finally, we were getting a break.
Before I could reply, Kim Tillis said, “Deputy, for the record, Martin Forbes is not dirty. He was unequivocally framed, and we’ve come to get him freed.”
Deputy Maines didn’t know what to make of that and she looked at me.
“It’s true. The guy in the security stills was in on the scheme to put Forbes behind bars. Who is he? What’s his name?”