couldn’t get the required shots, that he was allergic to something in them. He lied.” The wonder in her voice was painful. “He lied to me, about everything. How could he do that? Oh dear God, he was here all the time.”
Taylor nodded. “Would Reese know about Jake’s travel? Where he is at any given time?”
“Of course. I always send a copy of Jake’s itinerary to both Whitney and Reese. Jake’s secretary compiles it once a month and I just get in the habit of sending it out to them.” A look of horror dawned on her face. “You think Reese was trying to set Jake up, don’t you?”
Baldwin nodded. “It’s possible. Did Reese know about the problems you and Jake were having?”
Quinn thought hard for a minute. “I always try to keep that private, but I’m sure I’ve let little things slip here and there. Of course, they’re both men, and men sometimes understand each other and what they’re doing outside of the house.”
“Did Reese dislike Jake?” Baldwin asked.
That stopped her for a moment. “Dislike Jake? I honestly don’t know. He always seemed respectful and courteous. They weren’t that close.”
Baldwin nodded, then caught Taylor’s eye. “Quinn, we have to go now. We need to see if we can find Reese. Please, lock your doors behind us. You’ll be perfectly safe here at the house. Just don’t go out until we call, okay?”
Quinn sat, hands in her lap. She was so still, Taylor thought she must be holding her breath. She finally looked up at them. “I’ll do whatever you say. Please, don’t hurt him. He doesn’t know, he couldn’t know. This is all just a huge misunderstanding. Please, when you find him, let me be the first to talk to him.”
“What doesn’t he know, Quinn?” Taylor walked back to the couch and knelt in front of Quinn. She took one of Quinn’s hands in her own. “What doesn’t he know?” she repeated.
Quinn looked at the ceiling, drawing in a breath. She whispered the words. “He doesn’t know that he’s not our brother.”
Fifty
“T here’s no one at his house.” Fitz’s disembodied voice was yelling out of Taylor’s speakerphone as she and Baldwin broke all the traffic laws and speed limits getting to Reese’s house. “We’ve cleared the scene. He got away.”
“Put out a BOLO for him and his car. He’s in the wind again, and we can’t take a chance that he’s going after another girl.” She clicked off the speaker and glanced over at Baldwin, who was talking into his cell phone and making notes as quickly as he could.
“Okay, thanks. That’s what I needed.” He hung up and returned Taylor’s gaze, eyes deadly serious. “Nathan Chase has had one visitor. Only one. It was a male who came to visit him nearly five years ago. Care to guess who that someone is?”
“Reese Connolly.”
“That’s right. Now it all makes sense. If Quinn had just told us in the beginning that Reese wasn’t her and Whitney’s little brother, but a son, that would have made life a little easier.”
“Baldwin, I don’t think she’s told too many people about it. Obviously, she didn’t even think Reese knew. But he figured it out, didn’t he?”
“He must have. Visiting his father in jail. Man, that’s…wait a minute. Head back to the office. I want to check something out.” They arrived at the CJC in five minutes. Taylor parked on the street and they bounded through the back door, right into her office. Whitney Connolly’s laptop was still open on Taylor’s desk, an inanimate object that held all the answers they’d been seeking, if only they’d known where to look.
Baldwin pulled up the e-mail folder, then went to the white board in Taylor’s office, writing the address down.
IM1855195C
He started teasing the letters and numbers apart, the white board quickly filling up with symbols that made no sense to Taylor. Baldwin looked positively blissful, a mad Sam Nash of the profiling world. He finally stood back and let her see the finished product.
I/ M/ 1/8/ 5/ 5/ 1/9/ 5/ C
IM/18/5/5/19/C
I’m 18 5 5 19 5 C
I’m R E E S E C
I’m Reese Connolly
Baldwin’s face was triumphant, as if he’d just solved the most intricate key to the world’s most obscure riddle.
“How’d you do that?” she asked, not exactly stroking his ego but knowing he wanted to show it off.
“At first I thought it was Nathan Chase’s prisoner number, but that didn’t match up. It’s a simple code, correlating to the letters of the alphabet. R is the eighteenth letter, E is the fifth. S the nineteenth. After that it was pretty clear.”
Taylor stared at the board for the longest time, then stood, took the pen from Baldwin and wrote her own answer below his. The words chilled them both.
I AM REESE CHASE.
“His father’s son. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it, Baldwin?”
Baldwin was staring at the board, nodding. “I think it is.”
Fifty-One
Quinn Buckley was lying on the sofa in her library. She hadn’t moved since the police had left, simply stretched her feet to the right and her arms to the left and had gone horizontal with the minimum amount of effort. She was numb. Her sister was dead. Her husband was gone. And her son was wanted for murder.
For so many years, Whitney and their parents had fought about it. Whitney was willing to take on the responsibility, to call Reese her own. She wasn’t afraid of the scandal. She wasn’t afraid of anything. But their parents had decided.
The word had gone out. Eliza Connolly had been blessed with a late-in-life pregnancy. A wondrous miracle, and weren’t they so deserving, after what the whole family had been through. Why, Peter Connolly had comforted his wife in the only way a man truly knows how to comfort a woman who’s grieving, and look at the result. A son to call their own. Of course, Eliza had the baby a couple of months prematurely, but no one quibbled about that. It just wouldn’t be the right thing to do, now, would it?
Reese Connolly had come into the world the object of wonder and innuendo, but never, never to his face. The child was brilliant, precocious, so beautiful with his Raphael black curls and his cherub mouth. The eyes that took in everything, let nothing slip him by. No, there was nothing Reese didn’t excel at.
Quinn shifted slightly. Her life’s punishment was her inability to be brave at the appropriate times. She should have kicked Jake out the minute he yelled at her when she tried telling him the truth. When he cheated on her the first time. The tenth. The twentieth. She lost count. She should have stood up to her parents like Whitney had. Insisted that Reese get the recognition of his own heritage when he was old enough to understand. No, she’d never had the strength her sister possessed in abundance. It had driven them apart-Quinn, her compatriot, her fellow victim, siding silently with the grown-ups, refusing to admit what had really happened.
Yes, she cosseted Reese while Whitney shunned him. She tried, as she got older, to make up for some of the things she’d neglected to help him with in his past. That’s why she took him in when their parents died. She could be his mother now, not that he’d be allowed to see that. She made sure he ate well, got to school, paid for his college education as well as medical school. Reese had gotten his own share of the inheritance, but she didn’t want him to be troubled with the financials. He didn’t need her coddling anymore. He was all man now.
A man wanted for murder. Dear God, where had she gone wrong with him? She laughed softly to herself.
