When Chapel arrived at the police station he made me go over the whole thing, then made me do it again for Marcus and Hoffman. They didn’t need much from me; they’d already spoken to Tommy. It was Chapel himself who explained where Brian Quick had come from.
“He was in my office when you came by,” my lawyer said. “He’d called, said he had information about the video taken of you, that he was willing to sell it to me for a nominal fee. He pretended he was the middleman, claimed there was raw video stored on some portable hard drives, that he could get hold of them very easily.”
“We found them on Brian’s body,” Hoffman said.
“We’d like them destroyed.”
“They’re evidence.”
“Then as soon as you’re done with them, I want them returned to Miss Bracca.”
“Brian was in your office?” I asked.
“That’s why I kept you waiting,” Chapel said. “Needed to move him to another room. I didn’t want him seeing you. When Joy buzzed me that you were in reception, he must have heard it. I went to find him after you’d run off and he was gone, too. I can only assume he followed you.”
“Or got out ahead of her, followed her then,” Marcus said.
“Possible.”
“Way we’re looking at it now, Brian had a falling-out with his brother. Probably about just what to do with the video. Chris was the tech head. If he had decided to write the whole thing off, all he had to do was delete the drives. We’re thinking Brian killed him to keep that from happening, to keep his brother from destroying his big payday.”
“Then you pulled up,” Hoffman told me. “And Brian recognized the vehicle, thought it was his chance to make that money.”
There was silence in the room for a minute.
“Are you charging her?” Chapel asked them, going back to business.
Marcus chuckled. “We’re thinking of slapping a fine on her, for playing in the Square without a permit.”
“She can go,” Hoffman said. There was no smile. “Her father’s been taken to Legacy Emanuel.”
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Couple cracked ribs, some broken fingers, a lot of soft-tissue damage. He’ll be laid up for a few days. The worst of it is dehydration. Wagner didn’t provide much in the way of bread and water.”
Chapel rose, waited for me to follow him. I didn’t move yet. Instead, I said to Marcus, “I want to thank you.”
“You could have avoided all of this,” Marcus said. “All you had to do was tell us the truth.”
“I was scared Wagner would find out.”
“He probably would have,” Hoffman said. “He still knew people in the department. But we’d have stopped him anyway.”
I nodded, and then all of us, Chapel, Marcus, Hoffman, and myself, went to meet the press.
There were questions, so many questions, and reporters, too many reporters, and they wanted to know all of it, everything that had happened. It took most of an hour for the press conference to run its course, and Chapel had instructed me to stay quiet for the most part, until the end, when I read a statement he’d prepared about how glad I was that my ordeal was finally over, how happy I was that my father was okay, and how sad I was that Mikel was dead.
When I was asked about rejoining the Tailhook tour, Chapel said, “Miss Bracca’s going to be taking some time off to recover from the events of the last two weeks.”
When I was asked about the pictures, Chapel said, “No further questions.”
Saturday morning I went to see Tommy. He was in a room with two other patients, in bed and awake. The bruises on his face were purple and black, and he had stitches on his lip, heavy with dried blood. When he tried to smile at me, the stitches pulled, and he had to stop.
“I’ve been lying here, wondering if you’d come by. Wondering what you’d call me when you did.”
“I was thinking of sticking with Tommy.”
“This guy, Steven, he must have been some guy.”
“He was.”
“I’m glad you had that. I’m sorry he’s gone.”
I pulled up a chair, dropping the magazines I’d brought him on his stomach. He set them aside, turning his head to look at me.
“The detectives, they’ve told you what I said?” Tommy asked.
“I came to hear it from you.”
Tommy felt the edges of his mouth for fresh blood before answering. “Ran into Wagner by accident. He’d known I was out. I’d given Mikel’s number and address for my own when I registered for unemployment. I was at my meeting, I go to an AA meeting up in the northwest, by the synagogue up there, and he was there when I came out one night. He must have followed me from Mikel’s but he didn’t say, he didn’t say much of anything.
“Just that he had done me a favor, and he felt he was owed something for it. That it must be nice having a daughter who was so talented and so pretty and so rich. I told him all that was in spite of me rather than because of me.”
He stopped, looking up at the ceiling. I used the pitcher on the stand to pour him a cup of water. He drank it slowly.
“Go on,” I said.
“He said he wanted money, that he could make things bad for me if I didn’t get it for him. He said, since my daughter is so rich, she can spare some money. Not too much, he told me. Maybe fifty thousand. She’ll hardly miss it.”
“I hardly would have.”
Tommy rolled his head, meeting my eyes. “I told him I didn’t talk to you, I hadn’t talked to you for fifteen years. He said he didn’t care. He said it’d be easy to hurt you, that it wouldn’t take much. Someone famous, he said, it never takes much. Just some smack planted in your house, an anonymous call, that would be all he needed to do. He said he probably didn’t need to plant anything, the media would destroy you.”
“That’s why you came to see me,” I said.
Tommy took another drink of water, then settled against his pillows. When he went on, he picked a spot on the ceiling to speak to, not me.
“I just . . . I told myself I just wanted to see you, with my own eyes. Not on a television, not in a magazine. It went so badly, and you started shouting, you started offering me money, and I had to get out.
“I was so angry. I kept blaming you, kept thinking I should just take the money like Wagner wanted, that it would serve you right . . . and I hated myself for even thinking that. So I did what I always did when I hated myself. Not right away, I had to work myself up to it. But that Friday, I couldn’t find a job . . . and I started drinking. And
