Bernice led her across an airy room of sofa and chair groupings, card tables, and two televisions set to low. Windows along the far wall looked onto the grounds behind the nursing home, a pristine setting. Other residents took advantage of the inviting room and the view.
But one man in a wheelchair captured her attention. It had to be Max.
He sat alone, staring out a window. His body twitched and moved, and he muttered words she couldn’t hear. When she got close enough, his frailty shocked her. She remembered, as a child, being carried in his strong arms and hearing the comforting reassurance of his voice. It was all her young traumatized mind had grasped.
Time had changed everything—for both of them.
“Max, you’ve got a visitor.” Bernice raised her voice to make sure he heard. And to Jess, she gave advice. “It helps not to expect too much, honey. He’s got good days and bad. But you have a nice visit.”
She waited until Bernice walked away.
“Hello, Max.” She knelt in front of him and touched his hand. Nothing about this man triggered her recollection of his face until she looked into his eyes. Then it all came back in a rush, a flicker of images that connected.
“You may not remember me, but I sure as hell can’t forget you. You’re the man who saved my life. My name’s Jessica Beckett. You used to call me little Jessie, remember?”
For a brief instant, she saw recognition in his eyes. And he stopped his fidgeting and looked straight at her. But as quickly as their connection came, it faded away when his eyes glazed over again. Maybe it was only wishful thinking on her part that it had been there at all.
Undaunted, she pulled up a chair and began to talk—without a plan and without any expectation he’d understand. She would search for the words to explain what it meant to see him again and how things had been for her, then and now. And Jess wanted to tell him about his incredible son.
She hoped he would hear her.
10:15 P.M.
The stakeout looked to be a bust. Harper was a no-show, and the nursing home would soon shut its doors for the night. Jess finished the last of her cold coffee and stretched her aching back one more time. She’d moved the van down a side street and now sat steeped in the murky shadows of her vehicle. A bruise on her cheek throbbed with an aching heat, the aftermath of Pinzolo’s message from Nadir Beladi.
But Jess killed time by replaying the afternoon she’d spent with Harper’s father.
It had been a long day. Emotionally draining yet cathartic. Jess had told Max things she hadn’t even admitted to herself, knowing the one-way conversation had all the privacy of confessing to a priest. At the end of her visit, she had no delusions the truth would set her free, but it felt like a step in the right direction.
When she was a kid, the counseling sessions provided by the state had seemed like nothing more than a requirement, a box for an adult to check on a form. She preferred silence and isolation to the lip service of a state- provided psychiatrist. But after all these years, she felt ready to reopen the wounds that had never healed because talking to Max had been her choice.
The rush of emotions, old and new, had been instigated by Seth’s impact on her life. She was still grappling with those feelings when she noticed movement at the entrance to the nursing home. With binoculars, she confirmed the night nurse had shut the front doors for the evening. Visiting hours were officially over, and Harper hadn’t made an appearance. She took a deep breath and reached for the key dangling in the ignition to give it a turn when her cell phone rang.
“Yeah.”
Without any semblance of a greeting, Alexa got down to it. “You do realize I still have that tracking beacon on your van, right?”
Jess started to smile, but the effort hurt too much. “Yeah, I kind of like you knowing. You’re my anchor to a saner world.”
“That’s a scary thought,” she said. “What’s so fascinating? You’ve been in one spot for hours.”
“And you apparently have no life. Who’s worse off?” She sighed, and added, “I’m parked outside a nursing home.”
“You catch many bail jumpers in the blue-hair set?”
She would have made an effort to laugh, but she didn’t want to encourage her. “No, my money is on Harper keeping a promise. And I want to be here when he does. What’s up?”
“I received an encrypted file for the background checks and financials you requested. I’ve been digging into them today. You want the short version?”
She hoped having more information on Beladi, Burke, and Mandy would leave bread crumbs to follow. Harper could use a break.
“Yeah. Short works.”
“As you might have guessed, the smoker is cagey. We had to modify our searches to only his last name, and we found links to a series of corporations. Sleaze goes Wall Street. If I had to speculate, I’d say the man has family. And he’s been generous doling out his assets for the legitimate side of his enterprises, a way to launder his more lucrative business dollars.”
“You’ve got a list of assets I can see?”
“Yeah, I’ll send you what I’ve got. Give me an e-mail address.”
Jess gave her what she needed. And as curious as she was to see the material, she wouldn’t sneak a peek via her high-tech cell phone. These documents would require downloading and quality time for her to focus on each page.
“Hard to imagine Mandy hitting this guy up for cash.”
“Yeah. Now
Nadir Beladi certainly had the maliciousness and the deadly connections to be the bastard behind Harper’s frame job. But why? Had Mandy been stupid enough to blackmail him and drag Harper into her mess, guilt by association? Sure the smoker had deep pockets, but someone like Beladi would squash her like a roach underfoot. And he’d get Pinzolo to do the dirty work. She’d seen that firsthand.
Jess had a hard time imagining the self-destructive nerve it would have taken for Mandy to demand money from the smoker. But good sense was the first casualty when it came to drug addiction. More than likely, the crank did the thinking and talking for her.
“I’m thinking aloud here, but what would Mandy have on Mister Nicotine?” Alexa asked. “It wouldn’t take much for a guy like him to kill her. He doesn’t need a reason. Did she witness something that made her a target?”
“Could be. And Pinzolo looks like a guy who’d have a tattoo. Body art would be an improvement to butt ugly.” Thinking of him made her ache all over. “Anything on Mandy?”
“No, not much. She wasn’t exactly living on the grid like you and me. Well, like me,” she corrected. “I figured she did everything on a cash basis. Not much of a trail, and nothing current, but Burke is another story, one of the reasons this couldn’t wait for morning.”
More lights blinked off at the nursing home. And security lights kicked on.
“What’s up with Nipple Rings?”
“He’s not a financial wizard. No surprise there. But if he’s got cash stashed, it’s not showing on his bank statements or being reported to the IRS, which could be a nice club for the feds to wield if we find out otherwise. A couple of steady payments do stand out. Automatic debits. Nipples has a safe-deposit box and a storage unit he’s maintaining.”
“Nice. We won’t get close to the safe-deposit box, but that storage unit is another story.”
“That’s what I was thinking. And with him under wraps for forty-eight hours with the cops, I thought we could check it out. I dug up the address for the facility.”
“The address is one thing, but unless you’ve got a unit number…”
“You’re gonna have to trust me on this one, but I’ve got his number. I just can’t tell you how I got it. So if you can spare a few hours off geezer patrol to break and enter, you can meet me.” Alexa gave her the address. “And gloves are the new black. Bring ’em if you’ve got ’em.”
“No problem. I’m on my way,” she said, indulging in a smile as she ended the call and hit the ignition. “Harper…until tomorrow, my fine friend.”
Luis Dante remembered one important thing about Seth Harper from the bail hearing—he had an old man
