Mystery Heiress
Mystery Heiress
Suzanne Carey
Jessica Holmes had come to Minneapolis looking for a miracle. Her sweet little girl's life was in jeopardy, and only a blood relative could help–only a Fortune.Amid all the skeptics who said she was after the Fortunes' money, just one man believed Jessica's story. Dr. Stephen Hunter vowed he would fight to save her precious daughter. But he hadn't counted on fighting his own feelings for this remarkable woman, whose beauty and spirit tempted his hardened heart….
Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry
My whole world is falling apart! Just when I thought things were going to settle down, the unraveling scandal has never been more destructive. Our whole life is an open book for the public to scrutinize. All our deep, dark secrets we thought long buried are coming out one by one.
I’ve just found out the most shocking news about my dearly departed husband, Ben. Apparently, he had an affair that produced an illegitimate heir! I have to believe he had a good reason for what he did. After all, I’ve done a few dishonest things out of desperation myself….
A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
Dear Reader,
Writing about an extended family like the Fortunes makes me think of my own family, which is scattered from Illinois and Northern Kentucky to Florida, where I, my spouse and stepmother live.
Needless to say, we keep the phone company and the airlines busy, visiting back and forth and exchanging information across the miles as we continue to weave new strands in the rich web of our connectedness. Often our talk (both earthshaking and otherwise) is phrased in a kind of shorthand because we share the same history, the same context. In my opinion, it’s one of the ways families most help us find our place in the world.
In the story you’re about to read, the heroine, Jessica Holmes, arrives from England in the hope her long-lost relatives, the Fortunes, will be able to provide a bone-marrow transplant for her ailing daughter. Though the Fortunes are quite wealthy, she claims that’s all she wants from them.
Yet she clearly wants more—not money, as she insists, but rather her share of the common history and web of connectedness I’ve been talking about. To me, the way she goes about getting it, and fitting in, is as interesting as her struggle to save her daughter’s life and her romance with the handsome but troubled physician she learns to love.
Mystery Heiress
Suzanne Carey
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
I’d like to dedicate this book to my former editor at Silhouette Books, Lucia Macro, who has unfailingly offered warmth, creative latitude and good judgment for the many years we’ve worked together.
SUZANNE CAREY
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative assignments for several newspapers, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, currently reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they unite to face an unknown enemy, shocking family secrets are revealed…and passionate new romances are ignited.
JESSICA HOLMES: The search for a donor to save her daughter’s life and the discovery of her true heritage led Jessica to the Fortune family…and into the comforting arms of a man who can help her child.
STEPHEN HUNTER: Compassionate doctor. His strong shoulders are perfect for Jessica to lean on. But can he put aside the pain of his past to begin a new life with Jessica and her daughter, Annie?
MONICA MALONE: She was on the verge of achieving her lifelong dream of destroying the Fortune family…until she was mysteriously murdered. Is it too late for the Fortunes to stop the wheels of revenge Monica already put in motion?
GRANT MCCLURE: Love doesn’t come easy to a lonely cowboy who prefers his Wyoming ranch to the big city. Will he ever find a woman cut out for country living—and his special brand of loving?
LIZ JONES—CELEBRITY GOSSIP
Illegitimate! Well, well, well. What do we have here? It seems that Jake is not the legitimate son of Ben Fortune after all! Apparently, the prim-and-proper matriarch of the family, Kate, wasn’t a virgin bride! She was sleeping with another man and then tried to pass off to the world her unborn child as Ben’s.
And one of the few people who knew the truth was Monica Malone. My sources tell me that Monica had been blackmailing Jake for quite some time, threatening to reveal the scandalous secret if he didn’t sell her large shares of Fortune stock. If that isn’t a motive for murder, I don’t know what is! And if Jake isn’t guilty, then why did he skip bail?
The Fortunes are on a sinking ship. And I for one don’t see any chance of them staying afloat!
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
One
To some, he supposed, it must be an ideal summer day, bright and breezy if decidedly cool for the twenty-fifth of July—perfect for kicking over the traces and taking your kid to visit the lions, chimpanzees and zebras. But that wasn’t how it felt to him. A pensive, solitary figure as he strolled the curving blacktopped paths of Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota, thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hunter had no kid to delight with his undivided attention, no inquisitive, heartbreakingly courageous scrapegrace eight-year-old boy to whom he could explain that giraffes ate treetops for lunch and were strictly vegetarian.
To be gut-wrenchingly precise, he had no David. Instead of his cherished towheaded son, who’d succumbed to a rare form of bone cancer three years earlier, he had what felt like a gaping hole in his heart. To date, no one and nothing had begun to fill it. Or even come close.
Today was the anniversary of David’s death. Having purposely kept his schedule light, in view of the depressed and angry feelings that were bound to surface, he’d been drawn to the zoo by loneliness, memories of better days, and the ache of a loss he believed would never fully leave him.
A dedicated physician who specialized in treating leukemia and other blood-related disorders at Minneapolis General Hospital, and knew a good deal about tumors, as well, he hadn’t been able to stem the tide of David’s downward progression or, in the end, keep the breath of life from deserting his child’s wasted body.
Ultimately, the torrent of rage and helplessness that had followed in the wake of their son’s death had driven Stephen and his ex-wife, the former Brenda Torgilson, apart. Immersed in those bleak, desperate days as deeply as he, Brenda had accused him of failing to be there for her. He realized in retrospect that her criticism was probably just. In his view, the emotional desertion had cut both ways. After David’s loss, he’d snapped shut like a clamshell, living solely for his work and battling his grief in the keep of his own private fortress, while she’d gone to the opposite extreme, venting her tears and outrage on him.
Divorced now for the better part of a year, they rarely saw each other. Though Stephen regretted the breakup, viewing it as a personal black mark that could never be erased, he’d long since decided that in the final analysis, parting company was for the best. If they lived to be a hundred, he suspected, he and Brenda wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes without seeing the pain of David’s loss staring back at them.
Somehow, he needed to start fresh. Get a grip on himself. Live for real again, instead of simply going through the motions. He just wasn’t sure how to start. Never the kind of guy to get involved in casual affairs, he didn’t plan to take that path now. His son’s memory deserved better of him. Yet he was paralyzed by the prospect of committing to anyone. Most single women his age who weren’t already mothers deeply wanted a baby, while the thought of giving another hostage to fortune caused panic to grip him by the throat.
He, Brenda and David had come to the zoo as a family during David’s final, painfully brief remission. Though they were living on borrowed time, the occasion had been marked by a kind of frantic, ephemeral happiness. The remembrance of that afternoon had been his reason for coming today. In a way that was irrational and would have been difficult to explain, he’d hoped to catch a sidelong glimpse of his beloved child, if only in memory and imagination.
Pausing to gaze at the gorillas and orangutans, which David had always loved, Stephen noticed a slim, attractive dark-haired woman and a rather frail-looking blond female child of approximately kindergarten age who were touring the zoo together. The woman’s roses-and-cream complexion glowed as if it had been nourished by a cool but temperate climate.
Her naturally curly hair, worn short, framed her face in ringlets. Her clothes spoke of classic good taste and sufficient income to indulge it. She was wearing well-polished flat leather shoes, a hand-tailored beige wool skirt and a long-sleeved cashmere pullover in a flattering blue-violet shade. From what he could tell at that distance, the third finger of her left hand was innocent of a wedding ring.
The child was dressed a bit more warmly than her contemporaries at the zoo, in a plaid wool skirt, a cotton turtleneck and a red hand-knit cardigan with matching kneesocks and black patent Mary Janes. It was clear from the woman’s demeanor, in particular her nurturing but vaguely worried air, like that of a fretful guardian angel, that she was the girl’s mother and loved her very much.
Unfortunately, to Stephen’s practiced eyes her little girl didn’t look at all well. To begin with, she was too thin for her height. Her large, solemn eyes—he couldn’t see their color, thanks to the distance that separated them—appeared too big for her face.
For some reason, when mother and child moved on toward the seal island and the aquatic animals, Stephen followed at a slight distance, keeping them in view. Ironic, isn’t it? he thought, giving his head a wry mental shake. That today, of all days, you’d set eyes on a woman who could interest you. Really imagine, for the first time since David’s funeral, how nice it would be to have a family again.
His emotional state being what it was, he supposed it was just as well that he and the woman were strangers and he didn’t have an excuse to speak to her. The last thing she needed, if his assumption about her child was correct, was an emotionally crippled workaholic doctor cluttering up her life. She was probably married, anyway—a settled, if young and lovely, Minneapolis housewife with a doting, successful husband.
As it happened, the woman he was speculating about, twenty-five-year-old Jessica Holmes, a British investment analyst, had been widowed six months earlier, while she was in the process of obtaining a divorce from her philandering, well-to-do husband. She and her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, had arrived in the Minneapolis area just two days earlier, and were suffering from jet lag. Their tour of the zoo wasn’t as brisk or cheerful as it might have been, in part because Annie, recently diagnosed with leukemia, was somewhat low on energy, and Jess was terribly worried about her.
Maybe the zoo hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. Following their exhausting transatlantic flight, and a frantic day spent dragging her daughter to and fro as she tried to contact at least one member of the Twin Cities’ wealthy Fortune clan—as yet to no avail—she’d decided Annie needed a little fun for a change.
The expedition had proved to be only a modified success. Though she tried to tell herself she was just imagining things, Jess kept thinking she detected the harbingers of some ailment, a cold or the flu, that Annie’s compromised immune system would fight inadequately at best. Even on “good” days, when Annie had a modicum of stamina, Jess couldn’t seem to stop herself from hovering over the girl like a mother hen guarding a beloved and fragile chick. To her shame, Annie had picked up on her fears and, in her innocent, childish way, begun reassuring her.
I have a perfect right to be afraid, Jess thought, outwardly stiffening her spine and putting on her bravest face. Annie’s form of leukemia is deadly. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and soon. If she doesn’t get it, I’m going to lose her. And that would be the end of both our worlds.
It was the need for matching bone marrow, a rare and precious commodity, that had brought them to Minneapolis. As Jess had quickly learned once Annie’s condition was diagnosed, her child’s best hope of finding a donor was among blood relatives. Unhappily, they’d already exhausted every possibility among Jess’s scattered family members and the somewhat more prolific clan of her late husband, a prosperous but cavalier bank executive who’d been killed in an automobile crash, along with his most recent mistress, shortly after Jess initiated divorce proceedings.
Refusing to be immobilized by fear, she’d signed Annie up with a British bone-marrow registry and settled back to bite her nails when she ran across a letter, addressed to her grandmother, that had been among her recently deceased mother’s possessions.
Specifically, the letter had been tucked in a volume of children’s verses from which her mother had read to her every evening when she was Annie’s age. Scrawled in a strong, masculine hand on yellowing, unlined paper, the letter had suggested that Benjamin Fortune, a legendary American entrepreneur who’d fought with the Allies in France during World War II, was her true maternal grandfather, not George Simpson, her grandmother’s husband of many years.
In doing so, it had explained why some of the blood tests among her relatives had been so far off the mark, while opening up a whole new world of possibilities for Annie’s salvation. There had been no reason to doubt that the letter was genuine. Making up her mind in an instant, she’d arranged for a leave of absence from her London investment-banking firm and carted Annie off to America in the hope that one of Benjamin Fortune’s descendants could provide the help she so desperately sought.
So far, every door she’d tried to open remained closed in her face. True, after several minutes of impassioned pleading on her part, the formidable secretary who guarded the entrance to the executive offices of Fortune Industries in downtown Minneapolis like some kind of exquisitely coifed and made-up dragon at the gate had agreed to give Jacob Fortune, Benjamin’s oldest son and the company’s chief executive officer, her handwritten note when he returned to the office three days hence. But Jess doubted he’d bother to get in touch with her. From what she’d been able to glean from her hurried research into the family history, the Fortunes had been the target of numerous false claims on the family wealth over the years. Jacob Fortune could hardly be blamed if he regarded her plea as another swindle in the making.
Somehow, she’d have to convince him otherwise. None of the other Fortunes had turned out to be accessible. As she’d feared, most had unpublished phone numbers. International directory assistance had been able to give her just three subscribers with the Fortune surname in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area when she phoned before leaving England.
The two she’d reached had turned out to be unrelated. She wasn’t sure, yet, about the third. Phoning from her country cottage in Sussex several days before their departure, she’d twice managed to contact a certain Natalie Fortune’s answering machine, which had played back a friendly greeting in a young woman’s sweet, energetic voice. To her disappointment, though she’d left a message urging the unknown Natalie to phone her collect as soon as possible, no return call had been forthcoming.
A second call, made after they reached Minneapolis, had proved even less promising. This time, the answering machine had been switched off. Or unplugged. Maybe Natalie Fortune had moved, or something.
Whatever the case, Jess knew one thing for certain. She hadn’t come to Minneapolis to fail. Unless a miracle occurred and Jacob Fortune returned her call without further prompting, she’d camp on his doorstep. I’ll renew my quest tomorrow, she vowed, even if I have to leave Annie with a hotel-provided baby-sitter. It was a desperate attempt at pluck, coming from a devoted mother who hated to let her beloved, seriously ill child out of her sight for a single second.
Having looked their fill at the seals, polar bears and penguins, Jess and Annie headed for the giraffes and the other hooved African animals, pausing at a vendor’s cart on the way, so that Jess could buy her daughter a paper cone of raspberry-colored cotton candy. Her cheeks flushed from what Jess prayed was just excitement and not another bout of chills and fever to come, Annie took a bite of the spun-sugar confection, which colored her mouth a streaky hot pink, and ran ahead.
“Zebras, Mummy! Zebras!” she exclaimed.
Calling himself an idiot for maintaining his tenuous low-key pursuit of them, but intrigued by Jess’s delicate good looks and what appeared to be the strong bond between her and her daughter, Stephen Hunter kept pace. As he watched, unable to intervene, Annie stumbled and fell to the pavement, skinning her left knee slightly.
Jess was beside her in a flash, inspecting the damage. “Are you all right, darling?” she demanded worriedly, sinking to her haunches so that she and Annie were at the same level as she attempted to brush every trace of dirt from the abrasion with a clean handkerchief.
Annie seemed willing to take the mishap in her stride. However, she complained, “My head feels hot, Mummy.”
From what Jess could tell on closer inspection, her child’s large green eyes were exceptionally bright, as if from a fever. When she tested Annie’s forehead with the back of her wrist, she learned, to her dismay, that it was burning up. Her beloved child’s deteriorating immune system had failed to protect her from yet another virus or bacterial infection.
“Oh, baby,” Jess whispered, her heart sinking as she enveloped the girl in a guilty hug. “We’ve got to get you back to the hotel at once.”
She wasn’t aware of the tall blond man’s approach. As a result, she almost jumped to find him towering over them.
“Excuse me, my name is Stephen, and I’m a doctor. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked in his decidedly American accent.
He was tall and lean, with boyishly tousled, sun-bleached hair and penetrating blue eyes that hinted at the possibility of Nordic ancestry. His hands were neat and long-fingered. They looked capable. Jess’s off-the-cuff impression was that he had a kind face. Despite everything she’d heard about crime in American cities, she was inclined to trust him. Instinct told her his claim to be a physician wasn’t an empty boast.
Still, she wasn’t accustomed to accepting medical advice from strangers on the sidewalk—especially not where Annie’s welfare was concerned.
With a fluid motion that wasn’t lost on him, she arose. “Thanks, but not really,” she said in her cultivated British voice. “The abrasion on my daughter’s knee isn’t serious. However, she seems to have caught cold. I’ve decided to give up on the zoo for today…and return to our hotel.”
Viewed at close range, she was stunning, in the fair-skinned, dark-haired way Stephen liked best. A young Elizabeth Taylor, as she’d looked when she starred in the classic version of Father of the Bride, he thought, ever the vintage-movie buff. Her accent betrayed that she was British—on holiday in the U.S., if her reference to a hotel was any indication. More than he could have said, he liked her natural air of refinement and her obvious devotion to her daughter.
After three wasted years spent imprisoned in the cocoon of his heartache and loneliness, he realized, the social man in him was on the verge of reaching out again. He had to admit, the idea was more than a little frightening. Meanwhile, in his practiced and usually infallible judgment, her daughter had contracted something more serious than a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.
With an unmistakable air of authority that swept past Jess’s weakened defenses, Stephen crouched to lay his wrist against the child’s forehead and feel her neck with strong but gently probing fingers. Brief though it was, the latter exam caused her to wince. And no wonder, Stephen thought with a slight shake of his head. She had swollen glands, and doubtless a sore throat. Though he couldn’t be sure without a thermometer, he estimated her temperature at one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts.
He made a production of examining her knee, as well. Producing a brightly colored stick-on bandage from the pocket of his tweed sport jacket, where he always carried them for his younger patients, he applied it to the child’s injured knee as if it were a badge of honor before getting to his feet.
“Better?” he asked.
Distracted from her fever and the pain of her injury by the bandage’s novelty, Annie managed a shy “I guess so” as she stared up at the tall, blond stranger. She quickly added a polite “Thank you,” at Jess’s prompting.
“Your daughter has swollen glands and a temperature,” Stephen added, gazing directly into Jess’s dark-fringed brown eyes. “Hadn’t you better take her to a doctor?”
Tempted for a hot moment to abandon her us-against-the-world stance and let herself lean on this blond Viking of a physician who had invaded their privacy as if he owned it, Jess felt anger, tinged with panic, flow through her veins. What was he doing, exactly? Accusing her of negligence? Or attempting to secure a new patient?
“I would if we had one here in the U.S.,” she snapped, then crumbled as Annie shivered slightly. “We just got here from England day before yesterday, and the weather’s much chillier than I expected,” she added almost apologetically, drawing her daughter close. “I’m afraid Annie’s cardigan’s not warm enough….”
Stephen didn’t hesitate. “Here…take my coat,” he insisted, shrugging off his tweed sport jacket and wrapping it warmly about Annie’s shoulders. “Did you come by car?”
Jess nodded, overwhelmed by his take-charge manner and, now that she’d dropped her defenses, more than a little grateful for his intercession.
“Show me where it’s parked,” he offered. “I’ll carry her.”
With her mother at the tall stranger’s side, evincing approval, Annie didn’t protest when Stephen lifted her in his arms. Instead, she seemed to wrap her arms about the blond doctor’s neck and nestle against his tan oxford-cloth shirt as if she belonged there, as if she appreciated his fatherliness.
It was just an illusion, of course, fostered by Jess’s anxiety that she wouldn’t be equal to managing Annie’s medical crisis on her own, not to mention her residual pain over the fact that Annie’s father had so seldom evinced an interest in the girl. Instead of reading stories and taking their precious five-year-old on outings, Ronald Holmes had spent most of his free time chasing other women and driving fast cars while under the influence.
As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. If they could just find a marrow donor…
Their little procession of three had reached her rental car and, squaring her shoulders, Jess fitted her key in the door on the passenger side. Taking Annie from his arms and placing her inside, she exchanged his jacket for the heavy woolen shawl she’d left on the seat and returned it to him.
“We’ll be fine now,” she told him, gazing up into his sky-colored eyes. “Thanks for your help.”
Stephen shrugged off her gratitude with a polite murmur. Of his two chief emotions—a half-formed wish to see her again and his strong concern for her child—the latter took precedence. “Where are you staying?” he asked.
Again the multitude of news stories Jess had seen on the telly about the explosion of crime in American cities caused her to hesitate. Still, the man was a physician, if he was to be believed. And he seemed so kind, despite his pervasive air of loneliness.
“We’re at the Radisson Plaza in downtown Minneapolis,” she admitted impulsively.
Stephen nodded his approval. It was a first-rate hotel, with excellent service. Though he’d never slept in one of the rooms, he’d spent time there himself, at half a dozen medical conferences. She and her daughter were in good hands.
“In that case, you’re just a short distance from Minneapolis General Hospital, which has a superb emergency room, as well as a topflight pediatric center. If you don’t choose to consult the hotel doctor, you can take your daughter there. The concierge will be able to give you directions. In the meantime, aspirin, plenty of rest, fluids and a cold washcloth for her forehead should be fairly safe bets.”
The prescriptive nature of his remarks was softened by a downward tug of smile, as if he were well aware that she hadn’t asked for his advice and might not welcome it. Juxtaposed with his take-charge manner, the slight diffidence was charming. For half a second, Jess found herself tempted to ask his name and how to contact him.
It wouldn’t do, of course. Annie had to be her first and only priority. Still, she couldn’t help staring up at him in surprise. Imbued with wariness up to her eyeballs as a result of Ronald’s infidelity, and totally preoccupied with Annie’s welfare, she hadn’t expected this rush of attraction and interest.
Thanking him again, she buckled Annie’s seat belt and got behind the wheel. A moment later, she was driving away. Motionless in the parking lot, with its rows of automobiles and its scattering of potholes, Stephen stared after them. It isn’t likely I’ll run into them again in a metropolitan area this size, he thought, even if they stay awhile, unless she brings her daughter to Minn-Gen for treatment. Shrugging on his jacket again and thrusting his hands into its pockets as he strode toward his Mercedes, he told himself it was for the best. Yet he couldn’t deny that his inner man regretted it.
The moment they reached their hotel, Jess escorted Annie upstairs to their suite, gave her a child-size aspirin with some orange juice from the minibar and tucked her into bed with the cold washcloth that Stephen had suggested on her forehead. “Try to take a little nap,” she whispered, leaning over to kiss her daughter’s cheek. “I’m sure that, when you wake up, you’ll feel much better. We can watch a children’s show together.”
Unappeased, Annie clung to her. “It’s a bore being sick all the time, Mummy,” she said. “And I miss Herkie. Can’t we just go home?”
The question tugged painfully at Jess’s heartstrings. Herkie, short for Herkimer, was Annie’s pet Scottish terrier, to whom she was extremely devoted. They’d been forced to leave the dog behind with Jess’s cousin when they traveled to the U.S. The parting had left Annie desolate.
“I know, darling…. I miss Herkie, too,” Jess agreed, attempting to comfort her. “But you know Cousin Amanda is taking especially good care of him. I promise…we’ll go home to England just as soon as we can find somebody to give you that special treatment we talked about.”
Her eyes bright with fever, Annie considered her mother’s statement. “Will it really make me better?” she asked.
On occasion, bone-marrow transplants had been known to fail. However, the technology was improving by the minute. Jess wouldn’t let herself entertain the possibility of defeat. The trick was to find a donor.
“Good as new,” she promised. “Try to sleep a little, won’t you, sweetheart?”
While Annie dozed beneath a blanket, with the hotel bedspread for added warmth, Jess curled up on a love seat in the adjoining sitting room and occupied herself by jotting down the phone numbers of several twenty-four-hour walk-in clinics. She also looked up the number for Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. As she did so, images of the tall blond doctor who had befriended them at the zoo drifted through her head.
Annie was still awake when Jess checked on her, half an hour later. Though her fever had receded somewhat, it wasn’t gone altogether. The thermometer Jess gently inserted in her ear continued to register a slight temperature. To her surprise, Annie was hungry.
“Can we get cheeseburgers, Mummy? Like we saw on the telly?” the five-year-old asked.
Against her better judgment, Jess ordered cheeseburgers and milk for two from room service. She wasn’t surprised, just saddened, when Annie ate just several bites of her sandwich and pushed her plate aside. She tried to take comfort in the fact that the girl had drunk most of her milk and seemed ready to snuggle beneath the covers again.
Maybe she’d feel better in the morning. If so, Jess planned to head for the public library. Lacking phone numbers, she might be able to locate addresses for several of the Fortunes by poring through the Minneapolis city directory. Feathering a gentle kiss on Annie’s cheek, she returned to the sitting room and switched on the television, adjusting the sound to a barely audible level.
Having stopped by his office to handle an emergency appointment after leaving the zoo and gone on to complete his late-afternoon rounds at Minn-Gen, Stephen was back behind the wheel of his sleek sedan, listening to light classical music on the radio as he drove toward his home on the wooded shore of Lake Travis, in the Minneapolis suburbs.
Some people would say I have everything—a medical degree, an expensive car, a striking contemporary house with a view of the water, he thought with a familiar tug of irony and loneliness as he turned off the two-lane highway that led into what was referred to locally as “the village” and crossed the rustic bridge that spanned the creek that fed the lake. Well, they’d be wrong. Though he cared deeply about each of his patients and genuinely loved his work, his son’s death had eviscerated his personal life; for the past three years, it had been as empty as a discarded shell washed up on a beach, bereft of its former inhabitant.
Yet as he passed the former home of Benjamin and Kate Fortune, half-hidden behind its screen of mature firs and oaks, and proceeded the half mile or so along Forest Road to his own somewhat less imposing gate-posts, he realized that a Rubicon of sorts had been crossed. Hesitant though he was to give his heart a second time to either child or woman, he’d allowed the mother and daughter he met at the zoo to open a chink in his armor. Into it had flowed an uncomfortable host of half-coveted possibilities.
No need to get bent out of shape just yet, he thought wryly. It isn’t likely you’ll see them again.
Set well back from the road, with its deck and its broad expanse of windows facing the lake, Stephen’s cedar-sided house appeared somewhat closed and unwelcoming. Raising the garage door with his remote control, he drove inside and shut off the Mercedes’s engine.
Each time he ascended the shallow quarry-tiled steps that led into the silent, empty kitchen, he experienced a moment of heartache that there was no David to greet him, no eight-year-old clamoring for his attention. Some evenings, he couldn’t stop himself from going to the doorway of his son’s former room and touching the toy cars, plastic action figures and stuffed animals that lined the built-in shelving in unnaturally neat rows.
Tonight, he switched on some music, popped a packet of frozen lasagna into the oven and poured himself a glass of Bardolino. At this time of year, the sun set around 7:30 p.m. Chelsea and Carter Todd, the young daughter and son of his next-door neighbors, were still playing outdoors, under the watchful eye of their sixtyish baby-sitter. Stepping out on the deck to sip his wine while the lasagna heated, Stephen stared at the blue expanse of water that fanned out from his pier and wondered if the laughter of another child, a different woman, would help to make him whole again.
In the sitting room area of her downtown hotel suite, Jess had drifted off to sleep. She awoke shortly after 10:00 p.m., stiff from the unnatural position in which she’d been slumbering on the love seat, and somewhat unsettled, thanks to a confusing dream. Annie was still asleep, her forehead warm and dry against the back of Jess’s wrist, but not excessively feverish.
Deciding to let her sleep, Jess poured out a glass of mineral water and returned to the sitting room. The local news was on. Someone handed the sandy-haired anchorman a note as she retook her seat. It was clear from his facial expression as he scanned it that he considered the note to be of major importance, and she turned up the sound a little.
“This just in,” the man was saying. “Former Hollywood leading lady and longtime Minneapolis resident Monica Malone was found dead this evening in her Summit Avenue mansion. We take you to Mary Ann Galvin, our reporter at the scene. Mary Ann…”
Positioned at the curb in front of the Malone mansion, which had clearly seen better days, the reporter gripped her microphone with barely disguised excitement. Several uniformed officers, the flashing lights of a police cruiser and a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape were visible behind her.
“Thank you, Jay,” she said. “According to a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, Miss Malone, thought to be in her midsixties, was found sprawled on her living room floor shortly after 10:00 p.m. She was pronounced dead at 10:15 p.m., when police arrived.
“Stating that the matter is under investigation, officers have declined to comment on the cause of death, or speculate as to whether foul play was involved. However, a tenant of one of Miss Malone’s neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had heard she suffered a head injury….”
The name of the deceased former movie star rang a bell with Jess, and not just because of her films. I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere, and recently—I know it, she thought. Seconds later, she remembered where. Monica Malone’s name had turned up in a long-outdated, somewhat sensationalized magazine article about Benjamin Fortune’s career that she managed to dig up at a library near her home in England before leaving for America. Its author, who claimed to have known the Fortune patriarch personally, had suggested that he and Monica Malone had “conducted an off-and-on affair for years.”
In part because of Ronald’s infidelities during their marriage, Jess supposed, she strongly disapproved. Yet she couldn’t have denied that she found every scrap of information she could accumulate about the man she now believed to have been her grandfather extremely fascinating.
When Jess awoke again, around 6:30 a.m., Annie was worse. Her temperature had soared to 103 degrees. She was coughing, shivering and whimpering. Terrified, Jess decided to take the advice of the tall blond doctor they’d met at the zoo and take her to Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. However, she didn’t think she could bear to see Annie carted off in an ambulance if it wasn’t necessary. It would scare her to death and, incidentally, break Jess’s heart.
Accordingly, she bundled the girl up in two sweaters and a raincoat, and wrapped her in one of the hotel blankets. A sympathetic bellhop helped her carry Annie downstairs and summoned a taxi for them.
“Mummy… Mummy…where are we going? You’re coming with me…aren’t you?” Annie asked in alarm as the bellhop settled her in the cab’s back seat.
“Yes, of course I am. We’re going to the hospital that nice doctor told us about yesterday,” Jess said soothingly, unable to keep tears of consternation and panic from running down her cheeks as she got into the taxi beside her and drew her close. “You need better medicine than I can give you, darling. Plus some doctors and nurses to help make you better as soon as possible.”
Both she and Annie were grim-faced, tense and more than a little frightened as their cab drew up to Minn-Gen’s emergency room entrance. Before Jess could get out and pay the driver, a nurse and an orderly were hurrying out to meet them. “You’re Mrs. Holmes, right?” the nurse asked. “The doorman at your hotel phoned to let us know you were coming.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur. While the nurse examined Annie and took her vital signs, one of the secretaries at the nursing station helped Jess fill out an admitting form. The latter didn’t seem unduly concerned about Annie’s condition until Jess wrote leukemia under the heading Known Medical Conditions. A quick conference between the secretary, a nurse and a male physician who was in the process of tending to an accident victim ensued.
“You’d better page Dr. Todd,” the male physician decided, adding for Jess’s benefit, “She’s a pediatrician. I think I saw her come in earlier. She’s probably still in-house.”
With barely a skipped beat, the name of Dr. Lindsay Todd and the words “to the ER, stat” were being read over the hospital’s public address system.
Jess barely had time to smooth Annie’s forehead and whisper a few calming words to her before Dr. Todd appeared. Brown-haired, leggy, sweet-faced, in her mid-to-late thirties and decidedly feminine looking despite her white coat and stethoscope, she was crisp but extraordinarily kind and gentle as she gave Annie a thorough going-over and peppered Jess with questions.
The exam finished, Dr. Todd patted Annie’s hand and turned to Jess with a concerned frown. “I’d like to run some tests…get her white-cell count, check on the number of immature cells, that sort of thing,” she announced. “Or rather, I’d like to have an expert do it. As it happens, we’re in luck. Dr. Hunter’s in the building.”
Jess knew what the tests were likely to show. Though she suddenly felt very far from home indeed, maybe it was for the best that Annie’s crisis had occurred in Minneapolis. Maybe these energetic can-do Americans could keep Annie alive until she could find a donor.
“All right,” she whispered.
“Good. You two hang in there.”
Exiting Annie’s cubicle, Dr. Todd pulled the curtain shut. At her request, the hospital operator paged Dr. Hunter. Called back to the hospital around 5:00 a.m., after a restless night, when an elderly patient suffering from polycythemia, a condition in which the body makes too many red blood cells, causing the blood to thicken excessively, had taken a turn for the worse, he’d barely had time to shave. His blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue as he strode into the emergency room.
“What can I do for you, Lin?” he asked.
The brown-haired pediatrician quickly filled him in on what she knew of Annie’s condition. “The mother’s been told she needs a bone-marrow transplant,” she said.
Stephen nodded. “Let’s have a look at her.”
A moment later, with Lindsay Todd following closely in his wake, he was pushing aside the curtain that screened Annie’s cubicle.
Jess’s eyes widened as she glanced up at him. “You!” she exclaimed in surprise, unable to stop herself.
Two
Stephen’s heart lurched with surprise, regret, and a strong sensation of déjà vu. On some deeper level, he supposed, he should have known the acute leukemia patient Lindsay had summoned him to examine would turn out to be the feverish blond child who’d skinned her knee at the zoo, accompanied by her lovely but worried dark-haired mother. The possibility likely would have occurred to him, if he hadn’t been so gosh-darn tired and failed to scan the personal information on the child’s chart, which almost certainly included a permanent address in England.
He did so now, with a quick downward glance.
“Hello again, uh, Mrs. Holmes…Annabel…” he said, extending his hand to Jess and lightly ruffling Annie’s hair as he assumed his professional role like a coat of armor. “Under the circumstances, I won’t say I’m happy to see you, though I’m pleased you decided to take my advice and come here. This is a very good hospital.”
Aware of Lindsay’s confusion, he added, “I met Mrs. Holmes and Annabel yesterday at Como Park Zoo.”
“Oh,” Lindsay murmured. “I see.”
It was clear that she didn’t—that she couldn’t begin to imagine why, lacking a child to accompany him, he’d taken refuge from his busy but lonely life at a typical children’s haunt. He wasn’t in a position to explain. Nor would he have wished to, in any event.
“Let’s see how this young lady’s doing this morning,” he proposed instead, picking up his stethoscope.
The exam, which included numerous questions and a great deal of gentle prodding and observation on Stephen’s part, took several minutes. It wasn’t difficult for him to see that Annie was very sick indeed. He could almost have guessed what her white-cell count would be. Her English doctors had been correct in stating that she needed a transplant as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t just place an order for matching bone marrow as if it could be purchased from a catalogue. With just one in twenty thousand unrelated persons eligible to donate, from a genetic standpoint, and a paucity of registered and blood-typed volunteers, it could be difficult, bordering on impossible, to find a donor.
While they were searching, Annabel Holmes would likely need some form of chemotherapy as a stopgap measure. “No luck finding a donor for your daughter in England, I take it?” he asked Jess.
She shook her head. “That’s why we came to the U.S.”
Why Minneapolis in particular? he wondered. Does she have people here? There wasn’t time to ask. He was being paged again. To him, the brief request to call the nursing station on 301 West was shorthand for the fact that Mrs. Munson, the elderly polycythemia patient, needed him again.
“I’ve got to run upstairs for a few minutes,” he said. “In the meantime, Mrs. Holmes, I’d like to have the nurses here admit your daughter as my patient, with Dr. Todd as pediatric consultant, and assign her to a room. I’ll need your permission to run some tests so we can determine what her current status is…bone-marrow aspiration and biopsy, X rays, an electrocardiogram, blood and pulmonary-function tests, that sort of thing. I’ll be in touch just as soon as her results are available. Okay? Naturally, we’ll sign her up at once with every available U.S. registry.”
Annie’s illness was rapidly approaching a crisis point, as Jess had already begun to sense. Her little girl would die or, if a miracle was in the offing, she’d get better. It was that simple, and that terrifying. Except for their quest to find a donor among Benjamin Fortune’s descendents, her prospects weren’t bright. Barely contained panic causing a lump to settle in her throat, she nodded without answering him.
A sensitive barometer to everything Jess was thinking and feeling, Annie picked up on her fear at once. “Do I have to stay here?” she chimed in worriedly, gazing up at the tall blond doctor she’d trusted without hesitation the previous afternoon. “Can’t I go back with Mummy to the hotel?”
“I’m afraid it’s the hospital for you, sweetheart,” Stephen said, smiling in an attempt to hide his own consternation over the likely severity of her case. “We need to have you handy, so we can do our best to make you better.”
She appeared to think over his explanation and accept it. “Well, could I have another of those cool bandages, then?” she asked with five-year-old straightforwardness.
He didn’t make a production of asking where it hurt—just produced the requested bounty from the pocket of his lab coat and solemnly affixed it to the back of her hand, as if it were a good-conduct medal. A moment later, after ordering the tests he’d outlined, along with an antibiotic drip to help Annie’s compromised immune system combat her current infection, he was gone.
Jess couldn’t stop herself from shaking.
Lindsay rested a hand on her shoulder. “Dr. Hunter’s the best hematologist around, bar none, and I’m not just saying that because we’re friends and neighbors,” she vowed. “Your daughter’s in good hands.”
West of the city, in the posh, handsomely appointed master bedroom where Erica Fortune, Jacob Fortune’s estranged wife, slept alone, the bedside phone rang sharply. It was going on 7:40 a.m., a bit early for fifty-one-year-old Erica to be up in her previous incarnation as the pampered but increasingly unhappy mate of Fortune Industries’ chief executive officer, who’d succeeded his widowed mother following her fatal light-plane crash in the Brazilian jungle.
These days, as a woman alone bent on finding herself, if not exactly thrilled that her husband had walked out on her, the sleek, silvery-blond Erica rose early. Nibbling on cinnamon toast and drinking black coffee as she dressed for a 9:00 a.m. Saturday class at Normandale Junior College in Bloomington, she reached for the receiver and murmured an absent hello.
Her green eyes widened when her caller identified himself as Lieutenant J. B. Rosczak, a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department.
“Is this the Jacob Fortune residence?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure how to answer him. “Yes,” she agreed tentatively, setting her coffee cup aside. “I mean, it was, until a few months ago. This is Mrs. Fortune. Jacob Fortune and I are separated. What’s this about, anyway?”
Seemingly reluctant to discuss the matter with her in any detail, the police lieutenant ignored her question. “I take it he’s not there, then, ma’am?” he said.
“No, he isn’t,” Erica confirmed.
“Any idea where we can contact him?”
It was beginning to sound as if Jake were in some kind of trouble. Standing there in her sheer panty hose, lacy undergarments and partially buttoned silk blouse, with her toes curling into the plush beige carpeting, Erica took a hurried moment to think. Should she answer in the negative, and try to reach Jake the moment her caller hung up the phone? Of course, that would mean telling an out-and-out falsehood. Though she continued to have protective feelings toward Jake—still loved him, in a guarded way, if she was willing to admit the truth, she didn’t want to lie to the police on his account.
“Actually, he’s been living in his late mother’s house, up on Lake Travis, since our breakup,” she said.
“We’ve already looked there,” Detective Rosczak answered brusquely. “Any other ideas?”
Erica didn’t have any. “Maybe one of our children would know,” she speculated. “Or his secretary at Fortune Industries. Of course, she won’t be in her office until Monday. Please… can’t you tell me what’s wrong? Though we’re separated, I still care about him.”
The line was empty of conversation for a moment, as Detective Rosczak apparently decided whether or not to answer her question. “He’s wanted for questioning in the death of Monica Malone, ma’am,” he admitted at last.
Erica gasped. “Monica…dead?” she repeated in astonishment. “Where? When? How did it happen?” A ghastly thought struck her. “Surely she wasn’t murdered!”
It was clear from the detective’s tone that he was more than ready for their conversation to end. “Maybe you should turn on the morning news, if you want that kind of information, Mrs. Fortune,” he suggested.
Before saying goodbye, he made a point of giving her a number to call if Jake surfaced. “It would be better for him if he got in touch with us voluntarily,” he advised. The implied threat was hard to miss.
Erica was stunned as she put down the phone. Her first impulse was to call Natalie—at twenty-seven, the third-oldest of the five children she’d had with Jake. Natalie lived in an aging farmhouse that had been converted into a duplex, directly across Lake Travis from the mansion that had once belonged to Ben and Kate Fortune—which also happened to be Jake’s current residence. She and her father had always been close. Since he’d moved into his parents’ home, following his split with Erica, Natalie had crossed the lake on a regular basis to visit him. Maybe she knew something.
About to punch the speed-dial button she’d programmed with Natalie’s number, Erica ran one elegantly manicured hand through her silver-blond bob. It might be better to phone Sterling Foster, the family’s longtime attorney and respected legal advisor, first. If Jake was in a bind and the police had become involved, Sterling would know how to handle it.
It was Saturday. He wouldn’t be at his office so Erica rummaged in her desk drawer for her leather-bound address book. Finding it, she located Sterling’s home number.
The attorney was just getting out of the shower. He hadn’t read the morning paper yet. Or made contact with his first cup of coffee. He answered on the third ring, gruff because of the early call and the necessity of answering it wrapped in a bath towel.
“Hello?” he growled, adjusting the towel so that he wouldn’t drip all over on the carpet.
She tried not to sound too worried, knowing he wouldn’t like it. “Sterling?” she said. “Hi, it’s Erica. Sorry to disturb you at home, especially on the weekend. But I just got a call from Detective Rosczak of the Minneapolis police. Monica Malone has died, and the police want to question Jake about it. They can’t seem to find him. It’s possible he might be in some kind of trouble.”
Though he hadn’t heard of Monica’s death, Sterling didn’t evince surprise. “Sounds like it,” he answered dryly. “But then, when hasn’t he been in some mess or another, lately?”
Erica was irritated at what she considered to be his cavalier attitude, and still ready to spring to the defense of the man who was still her husband. She didn’t consider an inquiry from the police a laughing matter. “You have contacts in the department, don’t you?” she asked, her soft, cultivated voice taking on a more strident note. “I want you to call them…find out what’s going on. And find Jake! If he disappears when the police need to talk to him, he’s bound to look guilty of something!”
Dropping the towel, which he no longer needed, Sterling reached for his bathrobe. “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll do what I can. Go back to bed and stop worrying. If you plan to go husband-hunting after all these years, you’re going to need your beauty sleep.”
Touchy on the subject of her breakup with Jake, not to mention her age, which, despite her still-youthful classic good looks, she didn’t consider an asset, Erica considered the remark a put-down. It sent her through the roof. “Sorry to shatter one of your treasured clichés about me, but I’m getting ready for a Saturday-morning class!” she snapped, slamming down the receiver.
A tight sensation in her chest, she quickly called Natalie for emotional support. For his part, Sterling started to dial Kate, the spirited family matriarch whom he knew to be alive and well, though her family believed otherwise.
Seconds later, he changed his mind. Instead of phoning, he’d drive to her current hideaway, a penthouse apartment atop the renovated LaSalle building in downtown Minneapolis. She owed him breakfast, dammit. The last time she’d offered him brunch in conjunction with a business discussion, his ulcer had been kicking up. He hadn’t been able to partake. Devoid of sympathy, she’d devoured her blintzes and strawberries under his nose with her typical gusto.
He decided to have a look at the morning paper first. Wincing slightly, he saw that Monica’s death had made the front page, above the fold. Described as “still under investigation,” it had been given a banner headline. A photo of the aging star, taken in better days, accompanied the text.
Scanning the story, which had been written by a reporter he considered competent, Sterling learned that Monica had been stabbed several times in the chest. She had also suffered an injury to her left temple. Signs of a struggle had been evident. Several of Monica’s Summit Avenue neighbors had seen a man leaving her mansion shortly before her maid returned and found her body. No description of the caller seemed to be available, at least to journalists.
Damn, Sterling thought, tossing the paper aside. What was Jake doing there? The woman was poison. It’s bad enough that Ben was fool enough to mess around with her. Reluctantly he admitted that Erica had a valid point. Kate’s oldest son might turn out to be in some very hot water.
Though she’d probably heard the news of Monica’s death by now, he doubted Kate had any inkling of her son’s involvement. If she did, he reasoned, she’d have phoned him immediately. No, Jake’s name hadn’t appeared in the news. And Detective Rosczak, whoever he was, hadn’t gotten in touch with her, because he didn’t know of her existence.
She wouldn’t have a clue.
It would be Sterling’s job to break the news. Brushing his teeth, he shaved and put on a crisp white shirt, a maroon silk tie, gray sharkskin slacks and one of his expensive but conservative cardigan sweaters. A few minutes later, with his thick white hair impeccably combed and an unobtrusive Patek-Philippe watch adorning his left wrist, he was taking the elevator down to the basement garage of his condominium apartment building and striding purposefully toward his maroon Lincoln Town Car.
The LaSalle, a twelve-story brick-and-stone building dating from 1920, had been built in a style Sterling thought of as Mississippi River Valley Gothic. It had originally served as Minneapolis’s YMCA. In recent years, its sturdy shell and somewhat decrepit interior had been exquisitely restored to contain thirty or so smallish, extremely private luxury apartments. You needed a key to operate the elevator. There were no nameplates—just numbers—beside the theft-proof mailboxes.
A child of the Depression era who’d grown up at a time when twelve stories constituted a fairly tall building, Sterling liked its cozy size, black-and-white terrazzo lobby, clubby woodwork and art deco details. He suspected Kate was similarly minded. Having moved around a great deal to avoid detection since she’d faked her death, she’d rented the LaSalle’s top floor several months earlier. It was divided into two penthouse apartments. Hers, luxuriously carpeted and decorated, boasted several skylights, a small fireplace and a sweeping bird’s-eye view of western Minneapolis and its adjacent suburbs.
As he backed his Lincoln into an empty space at the curb and went inside, Sterling thought about the strange set of circumstances that had prompted him and Kate to agree on the extraordinary step of letting her family believe she had perished. Had they done the right thing? Or were they fools to think their scheme would help them flush out a would-be kidnapper or murderer?
As yet, it had been spectacularly unsuccessful. For perhaps the thousandth time, he puzzled over the identity of the hijacker who had stowed away in Kate’s plane on her solo trip to a remote Brazilian village in search of a key ingredient for the Secret Youth Formula she was trying to develop for Fortune Cosmetics, then appeared in midflight to hold a gun to her head. The plane had gone into a nosedive in the ensuing struggle. By some miracle, Kate had been thrown free, to fall through the dense undergrowth, moments before it crashed and burned.
In Sterling’s opinion, her attacker had been a killer-for-hire, in the pay of some unknown enemy. It was fair to say he’d probably never be identified. His badly charred remains had been taken for those of Kate by the Brazilian authorities. Meanwhile, having suffered a concussion, multiple fractures and countless cuts and bruises, Kate had been found and nursed slowly back to health by the natives of a remote Amazon village.
Aware that someone had wanted her dead, and might try again if they realized they’d failed, she’d disguised herself when finally she was well enough to travel, and made her way back to Minneapolis with extreme caution. Sterling would never forget the morning she’d phoned, her husky voice laced with fear and umbrage as she whispered into the receiver, “I’m alive, Sterling. I’m alive. Don’t tell anyone.”
Though he had a key, Sterling knocked at Kate’s apartment door instead of letting himself in, as he sometimes did, since he hadn’t taken the trouble to call first. Kate let him in. Clad in a red Chinese-silk bathrobe that flattered her small, slim figure and complemented, rather than clashed with, her upswept silver-streaked auburn hair, she clutched a mug of black coffee in one diamond-studded fist as she led him to the living room and a breaking news program on the television.
“Sterling…come in! You’re never going to believe this!” she commanded, waving him peremptorily to a chair.
The story that had captured her attention was the same one Jessica Holmes had caught the evening before and Sterling had scanned in his morning paper—expanded as more details and peripheral interviews became available. Unlike Jess, Kate had a strong personal interest in the case. Recruited by her many years earlier to act as a spokeswoman for Fortune Cosmetics, Monica had repaid the favor by conducting an illicit on-again, off-again affair with Kate’s husband, Ben, for years. Or at least that was what Kate suspected. Further, she had long sensed Monica to be a deadly personal adversary.
“It’s Monica Malone!” Kate added. “She’s been stabbed to death!”
Given a cup of coffee by the maid, Sterling scowled as a news commentator recapped the story. But he couldn’t hide his growing concern. If Jake was involved in some way, he’d find himself facing an extremely nasty situation.
Kate hadn’t picked up on his worry yet. “So…what do you think of all this?” she asked, her color high, as the station took an advertising break. “You know I’m not the vindictive type…that I wouldn’t wish a rattlesnake harm unless it was about to strike. But I can’t help feeling that what happened to Monica is at least partly her own fault.”
Sterling’s mouth failed to twitch with his usual amusement at her inventive turn of phrase. “I think Jake may have been mixed up in it somehow,” he answered.
“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked in alarm, turning her penetrating blue gaze full force on him.
As succinctly as possible, he described Erica’s call. “I’m just guessing, of course,” he said. “But it’s conceivable Jake visited Monica yesterday evening, and that it was he whom her neighbors spotted leaving the house shortly before her body was discovered. Otherwise, why would the police be looking for him?”
Kate’s brightly lacquered nails dug into the arms of her chair. “You’re not saying he killed her, are you?” she exclaimed.
“You know better than that.”
According to Sterling’s retelling of his conversation with Erica, Jake hadn’t spent the night in the Lake Travis house, where he’d taken up residence after their split. Where was he, then? Had he made himself scarce for a reason? Kate didn’t want to believe it. The Jake she knew couldn’t possibly be guilty of harming anyone.
“There could be any number of reasons the police want to speak with him,” she hedged.
“Give me one.”
“I don’t know…recent business dealings, maybe. He sold her that stock, remember, though God knows what his reasons were. No doubt there were meetings, phone calls. They’re probably combing the woodwork, hoping someone can give them something.”
Sterling shook his head. “I don’t buy it. This feels like trouble to me…right down to the core.”
It did to Kate, too. Her instincts in full flush, she was on her feet, pacing. “Damn that woman to hell…even if she’s probably headed there already!” she erupted. “She had her hooks into Ben for years. Now, as her swan song, she’s going to destroy my oldest child!”
From Sterling’s perspective, it was incomprehensible that Ben had ever preferred Monica to Kate, even as a side dish. Despite her impoverished beginnings, Kate was a genuine thoroughbred. And full of fire still; he’d have bet his stock-market holdings on that.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
She wanted him to protect Jake. Run interference for him with the police. Keep him from doing something foolish. Much as she loved her son, she knew his weaknesses. If he realized he was being sought by the authorities, he might panic. Yet he couldn’t call on her for support—he didn’t know she was alive. And he was too proud to call Erica. But he might get in touch with Sterling if he found himself in a jam. Maybe he’d tried to do so already.
“My dear, dear friend…please, go home and wait for him to call you,” she begged. “Keep the line open, just in case. Let me know when you hear from him.”
A bit grumpily, because he’d planned on having breakfast with her, Sterling arose. “As always, I’m at your service,” he murmured.
“If he calls, you’ll go with him to the police.”
“Of course.”
Though he doubted she’d make a habit of it, Kate surprised him with a swift, spontaneous hug before ushering him out the door.
Jake awoke in a run-down motel, with a sour taste in his mouth. He’d drunk to excess the night before—he knew that much. His stomach felt like crap, and his head was pounding. Seconds later, the painful throbbing of his injured shoulder brought back the whole frightening, humiliating scenario that had taken place. Groaning, he shut his eyes as the details of what he’d been running from invaded his memory and settled there. The argument with Monica. Her coming at him with a letter opener. A thrust of pain that had made him gasp. Him pushing her away, and her falling against the marble fireplace…
Like a fool, or some desperate kind of idiot, he’d gone to her house to confront her over the way she’d been blackmailing him—threatening to reveal to the world that his father was a poor slob of a foot soldier who’d died in World War II, not the self-made, illustrious Benjamin Fortune, who’d married his mother and placed a silver spoon in his mouth.
It was news his power-hungry half brother, Nate, would glory in hearing, and Jake had been determined to keep it from him at all costs. He should have known Monica would refuse to return the stock he’d sold her under duress, or promise to keep his secret—that she’d try something crazy, like trying to kill or injure him.
Because of her insane and jealous machinations, he’d all but destroyed the company his family had taken a half century to build, and lost most of the respect he’d once had for himself. Now she was dead, a corpse discovered lying facedown on her living room floor, according to the news account he’d watched before bolting from his parents’ former Lake Travis house the night before.
I didn’t kill her! he thought frantically. I know I didn’t! She was alive when I left. She’d regained consciousness, and I’d helped her to the sofa. I should have stuck around, I suppose. Phoned for help and stayed until it arrived. But she didn’t seem to be hurt that badly. She was shouting gutter language at me, threatening to come at me again, and I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.
Who had killed her then? Jake didn’t have a clue, any more than he knew whether someone had seen him leave the house. If his departure had been observed, he might not have been recognized. Yet his fingerprints would be all over the scene. His blood, too, he guessed, would have dripped from the wound in his shoulder. Plus, she’d scratched him. Bits of his skin would be found beneath her long red fingernails. His DNA would be everywhere. If he’d been placed by someone at the property near the time of death, the police would be looking for him. He’d be facing a mountain of evidence.
Fear congealing like an undigested meal in his gut, he got out of bed and paid an overdue visit to the bathroom. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn the night before—thankfully, the clean pullover and slacks he’d changed into following the shower he’d taken at his daughter Natalie’s insistence, not the torn and blood-soaked shirt and soiled trousers he’d stuffed into an upstairs bathroom hamper. Unfortunately, his breath still smelled of Scotch. And he didn’t have any toothpaste.
He shook his head. What must Natalie have thought when she came across the lake and discovered him, wounded, drunk and babbling? Now that he’d disappeared, she must be worried sick. Somehow, he’d have to make it up to her.
In the meantime, he’d concentrate on getting out of the mess he was in. For one thing, he didn’t know precisely where he was. He only knew that, after learning of Monica’s death, he’d hit the road and driven for hours, stopping finally at a run-down motel somewhere in Wisconsin’s north country.
A quick scan of the checkout card revealed that he’d spent the night at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake, near the town of Hayward. It occurred to him that, under the circumstances, his out-of-state flight wouldn’t look good. He might need legal representation.
Though it seemed like years since he’d run from Monica’s house and sped away in his car, less than twenty-four hours had elapsed. It was Saturday. Sterling Foster wasn’t likely to be in his office. Racking his brain, Jake managed to come up with his home number and dial it with trembling fingers.
After leaving Kate’s apartment, Sterling had returned home. But he hadn’t stayed put, the way he planned. Instead, a worried call from Natalie had propelled him to her house, across Lake Travis from the Fortune mansion. She had things to tell him about Jake’s involvement with Monica the night before—things she didn’t feel comfortable confiding over the telephone.
Annoyed that he had to go when Kate had suggested he remain at home and make himself available for Jake’s call, he’d quickly decided the trip had been worth it when he heard Natalie’s tale of an argument between Jake and Monica at her house, possibly over blackmail, Monica’s fall and Jake’s assertion that he’d cut his shoulder. According to the secondhand information he’d received from her, the aging star had been alive and ready to continue their argument when Jake left the house. As for his comments about blackmail, Jake hadn’t been specific. In fact, he’d backed off from them.
His claim that Monica had been alive when he left had alleviated the lawyer’s concern only a little. Coupled with the fact of her death, the circumstances Jake had described to his daughter spelled big trouble for him, in his opinion. Kate had thought so, too, when he reported to her on returning to his apartment shortly before 11:00 a.m.
When his phone shrilled just seconds after they finished their conversation, he picked up on the first ring. “At last!” he exclaimed in response to Jake’s tentative utterance of his name. “Where in the hell are you? Monica Malone’s murder is all over the newspapers and television. The Minneapolis Police are seeking you for questioning.”
The bottom dropping out of his feeble hope that someone else had been caught and charged with Monica’s murder, Jake told Sterling where he was. “You’ve got to believe me…I didn’t kill Monica,” he begged like a penitent child, “though we did have a run-in. She was alive when I left. Still, if the police are looking for me, I suppose I’m in a heap of trouble. I’m going to need your help.”
Sterling calculated that the motel where Jake had spent the night was roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Minneapolis. An unannounced and unaccompanied return might not be wise. It was entirely possible that the police had alerted their fellow officers throughout Minnesota and the neighboring states to be on the lookout for him. If he was arrested on his way back, or even detained for questioning, he could protest all he wanted that he’d planned to turn himself in and still not be believed.
In Sterling’s opinion, the best course of action he could take would be to drive to Wisconsin and bring Jake back, after notifying the authorities that the Fortune CEO would appear at police headquarters voluntarily that evening and answer all their questions. That way, he’d have a chance to hear the full story from Jake’s mouth—ask whatever questions he deemed necessary, and help him settle on the official version—before the detectives got a crack at him.
For Jake, the silence on Sterling’s end of the line was deafening. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “say something. Tell me what to do.”
Having decided how to handle the situation, Sterling was brisk. “Don’t go out,” he ordered. “Wait there for me. Talk to no one. I’ll phone the police when I get to Hayward and tell them I’m coming in with you…that you’ll answer their questions willingly. There’s a young man in my building who can accompany me, and drive your car back for you.”
Abject in his fear that he’d be accused of a crime he hadn’t committed, Jake quickly agreed to do whatever the attorney suggested. Breaking their connection, Sterling took a deep breath and dialed Kate. “Your son just called,” he said without preamble when she answered. “He’s in Wisconsin. I’m on my way to bring him back. On my advice, he’ll submit to questioning voluntarily. Naturally, I’ll be by his side….”
There was a brief silence on Kate’s end. “Do you think he’ll be arrested?” she asked.
Sterling was anything but sure about how to answer her. He tried to be optimistic. “I shouldn’t think so,” he opined. “Of course, I’ll know more after I talk with him in depth.”
It was the best he could offer her at the moment. Her relief, mixed with a certain amount of dread over what the future would hold, was palpable. “Sterling, thank you!” she whispered. “Without you, the family would disintegrate. Whereas I…”
Time was of the essence, and she didn’t finish the thought. “Call Erica before you go, will you, so she won’t worry too much?” she added, changing her tack. “She can get in touch with the children. Naturally, you won’t want to give her too many details.”
At the hospital, Jess had remained by her daughter’s bedside, desperately trying to think of ways to contact the Fortune family while waiting for the first of Annie’s tests to come back from the lab. A nurse entered the room around 1:00 p.m. and noted that Annie was asleep. “You’ve been here all day, since early this morning, without rest or anything to eat, Mrs. Holmes,” she pointed out. “It won’t help your daughter if you get sick, too. We’ll keep an eye on her, and Dr. Hunter will page you when the test results become available. Why don’t you run down to the cafeteria and grab a bite?”
If they could pull it off, Annie’s rehabilitation would take months. The nurse’s suggestion made sense. Realizing she was starved, Jess decided to take her up on it. She was seated in the brightly lit first-floor cafeteria, munching on a tuna-salad sandwich and drinking a cup of tea, when Stephen slid into the seat opposite her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, the panic that lay just below the surface of her thoughts staring back at him.
She was so lovely. So distraught. And so alone in Minneapolis, unless he was very much mistaken. It was all he could do not to reach across the table and pat her shoulder. “Nothing we didn’t expect,” he replied.
“Then…the results are in?”
“Some of them are. Enough to know Annabel’s white-cell count is severely out of whack, with a large number of immature, ineffective cells circulating in her bloodstream. She’s going to need a transplant, and soon, to correct the situation. As an interim measure, until we can find a donor, I want to prescribe a mild form of chemotherapy. It’ll make her fairly sick for a couple of days. But then she should have a brief remission. We’ll have a respite in which to search.”
Jess had dealt with the problem sufficiently by now to know they didn’t have any other choice. Reluctantly, because anything calculated to make Annie sicker was like a dagger in her heart, she gave her permission.
“I’ve asked my office nurse to register Annabel with all known marrow sources, including one that’s previously turned up several donors for us in Australia,” he added. “It’ll take a few weeks, maybe longer, to find out if there’s an available match.”
“And…if there isn’t?”
“Unless her remission’s far stronger than I expect, your daughter’s not a good candidate for autologous donation, the process in which a portion of the patient’s own marrow is removed, cleansed of cancer cells and replanted after the remaining cancer is killed off with chemotherapy,” he said, his gaze unwavering though it was deeply sympathetic. “We could try it, I suppose, if all else failed. But it would be risky in the extreme.”
Jess didn’t answer. There wasn’t much use in arguing the point. Annie’s doctors in England had advised strongly against the process in her case, as well.
“Mind telling me why you decided to come to Minneapolis, of all places?” he asked, changing the subject.
She supposed she might as well describe her possible connection with the Fortune family, though it hadn’t been proven yet. “When my family members—what few I have—were tested as possible donors for Annie,” she said, “those on my maternal grandfather’s side turned out to be so extremely wide of the mark that her doctors found it puzzling.
“Shortly thereafter, I was going through some things that had belonged to my late mother. An old letter fell out of a book she’d read to me as a child. To my astonishment, it suggested that my true maternal grandfather wasn’t a man named George Simpson, as I’d always believed, but rather Benjamin Fortune….”
She could tell from the look on Stephen’s face that he was taken aback and highly skeptical. Doubtless he’s convinced I’m grasping at straws, she thought. Or worse. “I have the letter right here, in my purse. I’ll be happy to show it to you,” she offered, determined that he should believe her search was motivated by Annie’s welfare, not greed, now that she’d opened up to him.
“I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
Silently she took it out and handed it to him.
From what Stephen could determine, the letter appeared to be genuine. It was entirely possible that the lovely, dark-haired Englishwoman seated opposite him was a long-lost Fortune relative. The physician in him leaped at the possibilities for his patient.
“During the short time we’ve been here, I’ve done everything I could to contact someone connected with the family, to no avail,” Jess went on, when he didn’t speak. “They all seem to have unlisted numbers. Jacob Fortune’s secretary did promise she’d get a message to him. But I’m not holding my breath.”
At that, Stephen regarded her quizzically. “I gather you didn’t realize that Dr. Todd, your daughter’s new pediatrician, is a Fortune,” he remarked.
Caught by surprise, Jess could do little more than stare.
“As a matter of fact, she’s Benjamin Fortune’s daughter,” he continued. “Granted, you wouldn’t have guessed it from her name. She went by Lindsay Fortune-Todd for a while after marrying Frank Todd, another of our doctors here, then simply dropped her maiden name….”
For Jess, it was if a door had suddenly blown open on a host of possibilities. Twin spots of color blossomed in her cheeks. With a surge of excitement, she jumped to her feet. “Surely, if she knows of the connection, Dr. Todd will help us!” she exclaimed.
“Not so fast,” Stephen advised, rising also. “Lindsay and the other Fortune children lost their mother, Kate—who, as you probably know, happened to be their only remaining parent—in a plane crash last year. To potential fortune hunters, the money they inherited is like a plum, ripe for the picking. At least one young woman whom most people regard as an imposter has turned up, claiming to be Lindsay’s long-lost twin, who was kidnapped shortly after their birth, and demanding a share. Long-lost relatives of any sort are bound to be something of a sensitive issue, especially with her.”
“But…but…I don’t want money,” Jess protested. “I want…”
Taking her hands in his, Stephen caused little ripples of awareness to flutter up her arms. “Take it easy. I believe you,” he said. “Lindsay and I are friends, as well as colleagues, and next-door neighbors. I think it’s fair to say she trusts me. Why don’t you let me talk to her?”
Jess wanted to fling her arms around him. “Oh, Dr. Hunter…would you?” she asked.
“Call me Stephen,” he said. “Thanks to Annabel, or Annie, as you call her, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. C’mon, let’s go upstairs and see how she’s doing before I have to check out of here.”
Pale and wraithlike as she slept beneath her hospital blanket, Annie looked like a little-girl ghost. Her control slipping, Jess wept softly as she gazed at her daughter. “I’m so worried about her,” she confided. “She’s all I’ve got. I don’t want to lose her.”
All too well, Stephen knew how she felt. A moment later, he’d taken her in his arms. Her tears were soaking into his hospital coat. An unplanned act, the move was meant simply to comfort her, or so he told himself.
To Jess, his arms offered a place of sanctuary and trust—and, incredibly, of nurturance. She wanted to lean on him. Blend with him. Burrow against the warmth of his neck. Despite her fear and worry over Annie, she realized it was a wake-up call to the lonely, loving woman in her—a woman who’d built a fortress around her heart when she learned of her late husband’s faithlessness.
As their embrace held, Stephen found he didn’t trust himself to move, or speak. By some alchemy he’d thought long extinct, he was holding a woman who filled his arms—one who, with her obvious refinement and strong capacity for love, might be able to fill his heart, as well.
A moment later, he was withdrawing from her. He was her daughter’s hematologist, after all. Professional ethics forbade his getting involved with her, even if his track record as a comforter of women who stood to lose a child did not.
“Ummm…Mrs. Holmes, I’d better be going,” he said awkwardly, when she didn’t speak. “We’ll have a chance to talk again tomorrow. Try to get some rest.”
Settling in a chair by Annie’s bed after he left, Jess pondered the fact that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. By itself, of course, it didn’t mean anything. Yet, coupled with the air of loneliness she’d noticed at the zoo and her persistent impression that he was a man who’d known sorrow, she thought it might.
She was aware their physical contact had embarrassed him. While her reaction to it had been quite a bit different, to say the least, she hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his care of Annie. Or prompt him to forget his promise to talk to Lindsay Todd on her behalf.
Returning home to face an empty house and the remainder of a lonely, aimless Saturday afternoon, Stephen found himself going into David’s room. On impulse, he opened David’s toy box and picked up some plastic cowboys and Indians, complete with ponies, that his little boy had loved to play with. The ache in his heart was boundless.
Aside from bringing the impersonal cruelty of illness home to him in a very personal way, David’s death had also taught him something about his fitness for a man-woman relationship, particularly one that might have to survive an emotional crisis. Or so he believed. As they’d dealt with the crushing blow of David’s cancer and death, he and Brenda had failed each other.
“What are you doing even thinking about Jessica Holmes?” he asked himself.
Three
Sterling and his twenty-two-year-old companion, the son of a trusted neighbor, arrived at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake shortly after 3:00 p.m. While the young man waited in Sterling’s Lincoln, the attorney knocked at the door of Jake’s motel unit and collected the keys to his Porsche. One glance was all it took to measure the Fortune CEO’s physical and mental state. Crusty, experienced courtroom warrior that he was, it tugged at his heartstrings to see Kate’s aristocratic-looking son so thoroughly leveled by the sordid situation in which he found himself.
Sympathy won’t do him any good, he thought. What he needs is a good strong dose of tough-mindedness.
Reemerging, he instructed his assistant to drive the sports car back to Minneapolis and park it in a guest spot beneath their apartment building. Handing over the keys, he gave the young man a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Put the keys in my mailbox,” he said. “If you’re stopped, you’re returning the Porsche to Minneapolis as a favor for a friend. That’s all you know. Call me on my mobile phone if the police give you any trouble.”
Chosen for his cool head and his lack of curiosity about other people’s business, the young man pocketed the money. “Will do, Mr. Foster,” he said with his typical nonchalance.
As he drove off, gunning the Porsche’s engine slightly, Sterling returned to Jake. “Okay,” he said, dusting off a somewhat grimy-looking chair and taking a seat, “let’s have it from the beginning. Tell me everything that happened last night. And I do mean everything.”
Still wretched and worse for wear, but with his wits more coherently gathered about him, Jake admitted going to Monica’s house and arguing with her over some stock he’d wanted to buy back from her.
“I was willing to pay a premium for it,” he said, bitterness permeating his voice. “She refused, using some of the foulest language I’ve ever heard. Suddenly, she came at me with a letter opener, and managed to stab me in the shoulder. When I struggled with her in self-defense, forcing her to drop it, she scratched at me with her fingernails. I didn’t actually push her until she picked it up and tried to stab me again.
“At that point…well, I did. I considered my life to be in danger. I guess I didn’t know my own strength, because she fell backward, hitting her head against that stupid marble fireplace of hers, the one with the naked dancing cupids. She was knocked out cold, but she came around pretty fast, and I helped her over to the sofa. Once she’d gotten her bearings, she started working up another head of steam. I was afraid she’d come at me again, and I’d had enough. I left and drove home…to Lake Travis.”
“Was anyone else in the house?”
Jake ran his fingers through his silver-brown hair. In that moment, the troubled edge he’d had for years showed very clearly. “Not that I know of,” he vowed.
“Was she expecting anyone?”
“If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”
A moment’s silence held as Sterling regarded him with a penetrating stare. If Monica had been blackmailing him, as Natalie’s account of their conversation seemed to suggest, he needed to know. He decided not to put the question directly. “Why’d you sell her the stock in the first place?” he asked.
Somehow, Jake had known the attorney would get around to posing that question. He wasn’t the first. Nate had grilled him about the stock, too, as had several of Fortune Industries’ directors. The fact that Monica had been amassing a sizable number of shares, with potentially serious ramifications for the company, hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone.
He couldn’t afford for the real reason to get out. “With my separation from Erica, and divorce looming as a possibility, I, uh, needed the money,” he prevaricated.
Sterling’s weathered-lion features contorted in disgust. “Cut the crap,” he ordered. “I want the truth.”
Usually so erect of posture, Jake seemed to sag against the mattress. “Whatever I tell you is confidential, right?” he asked after a moment. “Attorney-client privilege?”
The lawyer nodded.
“Okay, then. Several months ago, Monica informed me that I’m not Ben Fortune’s son. According to her, my real father was some poor stiff of a GI named Joe Stover, who got blown to pieces in World War II. She threatened to tell the world about my parentage if I didn’t cooperate.”
Sterling whistled. This was no clumsy attempt at dissembling on Jake’s part, but rather the unvarnished truth. His pain and sorrow were all too evident. The lawyer realized that, if Monica’s claim was true, the implications for Jake’s struggle with Nate over the company would be far-reaching. For one thing, they gave Jake an excellent motive for killing her.
“I take it you believed her,” he said.
Jake looked down at his hands. “Not completely,” he said. “At least, not at first. Dad’s name was on my birth certificate. Yet I’d always had my suspicions that I differed from my siblings in some way where he was concerned. I’m not saying he didn’t love me. Or even dote on me. But compared to the way he was with Nate, Lindsay and Rebecca, we were never really close.”
For years, Sterling had considered himself Kate’s closest confidant. Yet she’d never breathed a word of anything like this to him. “I assume the old tart offered you some sort of proof,” he said, a trifle angrily.
“She’d hired an investigator, rounded up a bunch of affidavits from people who knew Mom when she was just a teenage waitress. According to them, she was already pregnant by Stover when Dad appeared on the scene.”
“You saw the affidavits?”
Jake nodded. “They seemed genuine.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. Monica claimed that, after showing them to me, she’d put them in her safe-deposit box.”
The lawyer winced. In all likelihood, the affidavits—genuine or otherwise—would be found by the investigators probing Monica’s death. Her son, Brandon, a self-involved would-be actor and sometime errand boy for his mother, would become their proprietor. Even if he didn’t choose to bandy them about, they’d become part of the public record if Jake was tried as her murderer.
Somehow, Sterling had to keep that from happening. If it did, Kate would be wounded to the quick. And the family would be shaken to its foundations. Setting aside Jake’s bombshell for the moment, he concentrated on another aspect of the problem that was troubling him.
“From the way you describe events unfolding, your fingerprints must be all over Monica’s living room,” he said. “Your DNA, too, in the form of blood drops and fingernail scrapings. But…think carefully…did you touch the letter opener she stabbed you with? It’s likely to have been the murder weapon.”
His expression pained and his brown eyes focused on a point in midair, just past Sterling’s left shoulder, Jake tried to recall the details of the harrowing experience he’d had the night before. “I think so,” he said at last. “I must have, at some point, when I tried to wrest it from her grasp.”
Sterling stifled a groan. Jake was in hot water up to his eyebrows. True, there weren’t any eyewitnesses to testify that he’d done Monica in, because the simple fact was that he hadn’t. But there was more than enough damning physical evidence against him. If the police and the district attorney’s office settled on him, and suspended their efforts to find the real killer, he might end up being convicted of Monica’s murder.
He was going to need a crackerjack criminal attorney—preferably a team of them. As a lifelong practitioner of family and corporate law, Sterling wasn’t qualified to manage his defense. But he’d do his utmost to help. Frowning, he weighed the pros and cons of getting someone else involved at once, and decided against it. Jake would appear at police headquarters as a pillar of the community who had been victimized by Monica and had left her recovering from her excesses—an innocent man willing to tell the authorities all he knew, who had brought his family attorney with him for moral support.
It was time to call the police. Before picking up the phone, Sterling set some parameters for Jake. The Fortune executive was to repeat his story to the authorities exactly as he’d told it to him, without embellishment.
“The blackmail, too?” Jake asked reluctantly. “If it gets out that I’m not Ben’s son, Nate will sue to have me disinherited.”
Sterling was torn over that issue. There was always the hope that the whole ugly story would remain hidden until the real murderer was found. But that possibility was exceedingly slim. Besides, it must be clear from the physical evidence that Monica and Jake had struggled. For that, there had to be a reason. If Jake didn’t offer one, his story wouldn’t hold together.
The attorney wished mightily that he could consult with Jake’s yet-to-be-chosen defense attorney on that crucial issue. But it wasn’t to be. With characteristic firmness, he came to a decision. “You’ll have to tell them about it,” he said. “Your story won’t make sense if you don’t. And it’ll come out anyway. When it does, you’ll be seen as withholding evidence. As for Nate, there’s no way he can pull such a stunt. You’re Kate’s son, whoever your father was. And it was from Kate, not Ben, that you inherited.”
Instead of contacting Detective Rosczak, and working from the bottom up, Sterling went straight to the top. Nels Petersen, the Minneapolis police commissioner, happened to be a personal friend. “I understand your boys want to talk with a client of mine, Jake Fortune, the CEO of Fortune Industries, in connection with the death of Monica Malone,” he said forthrightly when Commissioner Petersen came on the line. “Mr. Fortune admits he visited Miss Malone yesterday evening. Though he had nothing whatever to do with her demise, he realizes the details of his exchange with her might prove helpful…”
Jake fretted visibly as Sterling listened to the police commissioner’s reply. The lawyer didn’t bother to enlighten him. “He’s out of town just now, but he’ll be back by dinnertime,” he said at last. “All right if we meet with you and the detectives who are handling the case at the Government Center around 7:30 p.m.? You’ll be there personally, I trust?”
It was a big favor to ask on a Saturday evening, when Commissioner Petersen doubtless had other plans. Yet the man agreed. Now, thought Sterling, all I have to do is drive Jake back to Minneapolis, see to it that he gets a shower, a shave and a hot meal, and help him firm up his story. At times, he reflected, lawyering was a lot like baby-sitting.
Jake’s encounter with the police that evening at the Hennepin County Government Center went as well as could be expected. With Sterling and Commissioner Petersen present, Detective Rosczak and his partner, Detective Harbing, didn’t try any tricky stuff. Yet they were hard-edged, skeptical, persistent. To Jake it felt as if they went over every point of his story a hundred times. Though both detectives seemed surprised, even taken aback, by his admission that Monica Malone had been blackmailing him, neither of them appeared to believe his version of what had taken place.
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Suzanne Carey
Jessica Holmes had come to Minneapolis looking for a miracle. Her sweet little girl's life was in jeopardy, and only a blood relative could help–only a Fortune.Amid all the skeptics who said she was after the Fortunes' money, just one man believed Jessica's story. Dr. Stephen Hunter vowed he would fight to save her precious daughter. But he hadn't counted on fighting his own feelings for this remarkable woman, whose beauty and spirit tempted his hardened heart….
Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry
My whole world is falling apart! Just when I thought things were going to settle down, the unraveling scandal has never been more destructive. Our whole life is an open book for the public to scrutinize. All our deep, dark secrets we thought long buried are coming out one by one.
I’ve just found out the most shocking news about my dearly departed husband, Ben. Apparently, he had an affair that produced an illegitimate heir! I have to believe he had a good reason for what he did. After all, I’ve done a few dishonest things out of desperation myself….
A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
Dear Reader,
Writing about an extended family like the Fortunes makes me think of my own family, which is scattered from Illinois and Northern Kentucky to Florida, where I, my spouse and stepmother live.
Needless to say, we keep the phone company and the airlines busy, visiting back and forth and exchanging information across the miles as we continue to weave new strands in the rich web of our connectedness. Often our talk (both earthshaking and otherwise) is phrased in a kind of shorthand because we share the same history, the same context. In my opinion, it’s one of the ways families most help us find our place in the world.
In the story you’re about to read, the heroine, Jessica Holmes, arrives from England in the hope her long-lost relatives, the Fortunes, will be able to provide a bone-marrow transplant for her ailing daughter. Though the Fortunes are quite wealthy, she claims that’s all she wants from them.
Yet she clearly wants more—not money, as she insists, but rather her share of the common history and web of connectedness I’ve been talking about. To me, the way she goes about getting it, and fitting in, is as interesting as her struggle to save her daughter’s life and her romance with the handsome but troubled physician she learns to love.
Mystery Heiress
Suzanne Carey
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
I’d like to dedicate this book to my former editor at Silhouette Books, Lucia Macro, who has unfailingly offered warmth, creative latitude and good judgment for the many years we’ve worked together.
SUZANNE CAREY
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative assignments for several newspapers, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, currently reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they unite to face an unknown enemy, shocking family secrets are revealed…and passionate new romances are ignited.
JESSICA HOLMES: The search for a donor to save her daughter’s life and the discovery of her true heritage led Jessica to the Fortune family…and into the comforting arms of a man who can help her child.
STEPHEN HUNTER: Compassionate doctor. His strong shoulders are perfect for Jessica to lean on. But can he put aside the pain of his past to begin a new life with Jessica and her daughter, Annie?
MONICA MALONE: She was on the verge of achieving her lifelong dream of destroying the Fortune family…until she was mysteriously murdered. Is it too late for the Fortunes to stop the wheels of revenge Monica already put in motion?
GRANT MCCLURE: Love doesn’t come easy to a lonely cowboy who prefers his Wyoming ranch to the big city. Will he ever find a woman cut out for country living—and his special brand of loving?
LIZ JONES—CELEBRITY GOSSIP
Illegitimate! Well, well, well. What do we have here? It seems that Jake is not the legitimate son of Ben Fortune after all! Apparently, the prim-and-proper matriarch of the family, Kate, wasn’t a virgin bride! She was sleeping with another man and then tried to pass off to the world her unborn child as Ben’s.
And one of the few people who knew the truth was Monica Malone. My sources tell me that Monica had been blackmailing Jake for quite some time, threatening to reveal the scandalous secret if he didn’t sell her large shares of Fortune stock. If that isn’t a motive for murder, I don’t know what is! And if Jake isn’t guilty, then why did he skip bail?
The Fortunes are on a sinking ship. And I for one don’t see any chance of them staying afloat!
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
One
To some, he supposed, it must be an ideal summer day, bright and breezy if decidedly cool for the twenty-fifth of July—perfect for kicking over the traces and taking your kid to visit the lions, chimpanzees and zebras. But that wasn’t how it felt to him. A pensive, solitary figure as he strolled the curving blacktopped paths of Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota, thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hunter had no kid to delight with his undivided attention, no inquisitive, heartbreakingly courageous scrapegrace eight-year-old boy to whom he could explain that giraffes ate treetops for lunch and were strictly vegetarian.
To be gut-wrenchingly precise, he had no David. Instead of his cherished towheaded son, who’d succumbed to a rare form of bone cancer three years earlier, he had what felt like a gaping hole in his heart. To date, no one and nothing had begun to fill it. Or even come close.
Today was the anniversary of David’s death. Having purposely kept his schedule light, in view of the depressed and angry feelings that were bound to surface, he’d been drawn to the zoo by loneliness, memories of better days, and the ache of a loss he believed would never fully leave him.
A dedicated physician who specialized in treating leukemia and other blood-related disorders at Minneapolis General Hospital, and knew a good deal about tumors, as well, he hadn’t been able to stem the tide of David’s downward progression or, in the end, keep the breath of life from deserting his child’s wasted body.
Ultimately, the torrent of rage and helplessness that had followed in the wake of their son’s death had driven Stephen and his ex-wife, the former Brenda Torgilson, apart. Immersed in those bleak, desperate days as deeply as he, Brenda had accused him of failing to be there for her. He realized in retrospect that her criticism was probably just. In his view, the emotional desertion had cut both ways. After David’s loss, he’d snapped shut like a clamshell, living solely for his work and battling his grief in the keep of his own private fortress, while she’d gone to the opposite extreme, venting her tears and outrage on him.
Divorced now for the better part of a year, they rarely saw each other. Though Stephen regretted the breakup, viewing it as a personal black mark that could never be erased, he’d long since decided that in the final analysis, parting company was for the best. If they lived to be a hundred, he suspected, he and Brenda wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes without seeing the pain of David’s loss staring back at them.
Somehow, he needed to start fresh. Get a grip on himself. Live for real again, instead of simply going through the motions. He just wasn’t sure how to start. Never the kind of guy to get involved in casual affairs, he didn’t plan to take that path now. His son’s memory deserved better of him. Yet he was paralyzed by the prospect of committing to anyone. Most single women his age who weren’t already mothers deeply wanted a baby, while the thought of giving another hostage to fortune caused panic to grip him by the throat.
He, Brenda and David had come to the zoo as a family during David’s final, painfully brief remission. Though they were living on borrowed time, the occasion had been marked by a kind of frantic, ephemeral happiness. The remembrance of that afternoon had been his reason for coming today. In a way that was irrational and would have been difficult to explain, he’d hoped to catch a sidelong glimpse of his beloved child, if only in memory and imagination.
Pausing to gaze at the gorillas and orangutans, which David had always loved, Stephen noticed a slim, attractive dark-haired woman and a rather frail-looking blond female child of approximately kindergarten age who were touring the zoo together. The woman’s roses-and-cream complexion glowed as if it had been nourished by a cool but temperate climate.
Her naturally curly hair, worn short, framed her face in ringlets. Her clothes spoke of classic good taste and sufficient income to indulge it. She was wearing well-polished flat leather shoes, a hand-tailored beige wool skirt and a long-sleeved cashmere pullover in a flattering blue-violet shade. From what he could tell at that distance, the third finger of her left hand was innocent of a wedding ring.
The child was dressed a bit more warmly than her contemporaries at the zoo, in a plaid wool skirt, a cotton turtleneck and a red hand-knit cardigan with matching kneesocks and black patent Mary Janes. It was clear from the woman’s demeanor, in particular her nurturing but vaguely worried air, like that of a fretful guardian angel, that she was the girl’s mother and loved her very much.
Unfortunately, to Stephen’s practiced eyes her little girl didn’t look at all well. To begin with, she was too thin for her height. Her large, solemn eyes—he couldn’t see their color, thanks to the distance that separated them—appeared too big for her face.
For some reason, when mother and child moved on toward the seal island and the aquatic animals, Stephen followed at a slight distance, keeping them in view. Ironic, isn’t it? he thought, giving his head a wry mental shake. That today, of all days, you’d set eyes on a woman who could interest you. Really imagine, for the first time since David’s funeral, how nice it would be to have a family again.
His emotional state being what it was, he supposed it was just as well that he and the woman were strangers and he didn’t have an excuse to speak to her. The last thing she needed, if his assumption about her child was correct, was an emotionally crippled workaholic doctor cluttering up her life. She was probably married, anyway—a settled, if young and lovely, Minneapolis housewife with a doting, successful husband.
As it happened, the woman he was speculating about, twenty-five-year-old Jessica Holmes, a British investment analyst, had been widowed six months earlier, while she was in the process of obtaining a divorce from her philandering, well-to-do husband. She and her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, had arrived in the Minneapolis area just two days earlier, and were suffering from jet lag. Their tour of the zoo wasn’t as brisk or cheerful as it might have been, in part because Annie, recently diagnosed with leukemia, was somewhat low on energy, and Jess was terribly worried about her.
Maybe the zoo hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. Following their exhausting transatlantic flight, and a frantic day spent dragging her daughter to and fro as she tried to contact at least one member of the Twin Cities’ wealthy Fortune clan—as yet to no avail—she’d decided Annie needed a little fun for a change.
The expedition had proved to be only a modified success. Though she tried to tell herself she was just imagining things, Jess kept thinking she detected the harbingers of some ailment, a cold or the flu, that Annie’s compromised immune system would fight inadequately at best. Even on “good” days, when Annie had a modicum of stamina, Jess couldn’t seem to stop herself from hovering over the girl like a mother hen guarding a beloved and fragile chick. To her shame, Annie had picked up on her fears and, in her innocent, childish way, begun reassuring her.
I have a perfect right to be afraid, Jess thought, outwardly stiffening her spine and putting on her bravest face. Annie’s form of leukemia is deadly. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and soon. If she doesn’t get it, I’m going to lose her. And that would be the end of both our worlds.
It was the need for matching bone marrow, a rare and precious commodity, that had brought them to Minneapolis. As Jess had quickly learned once Annie’s condition was diagnosed, her child’s best hope of finding a donor was among blood relatives. Unhappily, they’d already exhausted every possibility among Jess’s scattered family members and the somewhat more prolific clan of her late husband, a prosperous but cavalier bank executive who’d been killed in an automobile crash, along with his most recent mistress, shortly after Jess initiated divorce proceedings.
Refusing to be immobilized by fear, she’d signed Annie up with a British bone-marrow registry and settled back to bite her nails when she ran across a letter, addressed to her grandmother, that had been among her recently deceased mother’s possessions.
Specifically, the letter had been tucked in a volume of children’s verses from which her mother had read to her every evening when she was Annie’s age. Scrawled in a strong, masculine hand on yellowing, unlined paper, the letter had suggested that Benjamin Fortune, a legendary American entrepreneur who’d fought with the Allies in France during World War II, was her true maternal grandfather, not George Simpson, her grandmother’s husband of many years.
In doing so, it had explained why some of the blood tests among her relatives had been so far off the mark, while opening up a whole new world of possibilities for Annie’s salvation. There had been no reason to doubt that the letter was genuine. Making up her mind in an instant, she’d arranged for a leave of absence from her London investment-banking firm and carted Annie off to America in the hope that one of Benjamin Fortune’s descendants could provide the help she so desperately sought.
So far, every door she’d tried to open remained closed in her face. True, after several minutes of impassioned pleading on her part, the formidable secretary who guarded the entrance to the executive offices of Fortune Industries in downtown Minneapolis like some kind of exquisitely coifed and made-up dragon at the gate had agreed to give Jacob Fortune, Benjamin’s oldest son and the company’s chief executive officer, her handwritten note when he returned to the office three days hence. But Jess doubted he’d bother to get in touch with her. From what she’d been able to glean from her hurried research into the family history, the Fortunes had been the target of numerous false claims on the family wealth over the years. Jacob Fortune could hardly be blamed if he regarded her plea as another swindle in the making.
Somehow, she’d have to convince him otherwise. None of the other Fortunes had turned out to be accessible. As she’d feared, most had unpublished phone numbers. International directory assistance had been able to give her just three subscribers with the Fortune surname in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area when she phoned before leaving England.
The two she’d reached had turned out to be unrelated. She wasn’t sure, yet, about the third. Phoning from her country cottage in Sussex several days before their departure, she’d twice managed to contact a certain Natalie Fortune’s answering machine, which had played back a friendly greeting in a young woman’s sweet, energetic voice. To her disappointment, though she’d left a message urging the unknown Natalie to phone her collect as soon as possible, no return call had been forthcoming.
A second call, made after they reached Minneapolis, had proved even less promising. This time, the answering machine had been switched off. Or unplugged. Maybe Natalie Fortune had moved, or something.
Whatever the case, Jess knew one thing for certain. She hadn’t come to Minneapolis to fail. Unless a miracle occurred and Jacob Fortune returned her call without further prompting, she’d camp on his doorstep. I’ll renew my quest tomorrow, she vowed, even if I have to leave Annie with a hotel-provided baby-sitter. It was a desperate attempt at pluck, coming from a devoted mother who hated to let her beloved, seriously ill child out of her sight for a single second.
Having looked their fill at the seals, polar bears and penguins, Jess and Annie headed for the giraffes and the other hooved African animals, pausing at a vendor’s cart on the way, so that Jess could buy her daughter a paper cone of raspberry-colored cotton candy. Her cheeks flushed from what Jess prayed was just excitement and not another bout of chills and fever to come, Annie took a bite of the spun-sugar confection, which colored her mouth a streaky hot pink, and ran ahead.
“Zebras, Mummy! Zebras!” she exclaimed.
Calling himself an idiot for maintaining his tenuous low-key pursuit of them, but intrigued by Jess’s delicate good looks and what appeared to be the strong bond between her and her daughter, Stephen Hunter kept pace. As he watched, unable to intervene, Annie stumbled and fell to the pavement, skinning her left knee slightly.
Jess was beside her in a flash, inspecting the damage. “Are you all right, darling?” she demanded worriedly, sinking to her haunches so that she and Annie were at the same level as she attempted to brush every trace of dirt from the abrasion with a clean handkerchief.
Annie seemed willing to take the mishap in her stride. However, she complained, “My head feels hot, Mummy.”
From what Jess could tell on closer inspection, her child’s large green eyes were exceptionally bright, as if from a fever. When she tested Annie’s forehead with the back of her wrist, she learned, to her dismay, that it was burning up. Her beloved child’s deteriorating immune system had failed to protect her from yet another virus or bacterial infection.
“Oh, baby,” Jess whispered, her heart sinking as she enveloped the girl in a guilty hug. “We’ve got to get you back to the hotel at once.”
She wasn’t aware of the tall blond man’s approach. As a result, she almost jumped to find him towering over them.
“Excuse me, my name is Stephen, and I’m a doctor. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked in his decidedly American accent.
He was tall and lean, with boyishly tousled, sun-bleached hair and penetrating blue eyes that hinted at the possibility of Nordic ancestry. His hands were neat and long-fingered. They looked capable. Jess’s off-the-cuff impression was that he had a kind face. Despite everything she’d heard about crime in American cities, she was inclined to trust him. Instinct told her his claim to be a physician wasn’t an empty boast.
Still, she wasn’t accustomed to accepting medical advice from strangers on the sidewalk—especially not where Annie’s welfare was concerned.
With a fluid motion that wasn’t lost on him, she arose. “Thanks, but not really,” she said in her cultivated British voice. “The abrasion on my daughter’s knee isn’t serious. However, she seems to have caught cold. I’ve decided to give up on the zoo for today…and return to our hotel.”
Viewed at close range, she was stunning, in the fair-skinned, dark-haired way Stephen liked best. A young Elizabeth Taylor, as she’d looked when she starred in the classic version of Father of the Bride, he thought, ever the vintage-movie buff. Her accent betrayed that she was British—on holiday in the U.S., if her reference to a hotel was any indication. More than he could have said, he liked her natural air of refinement and her obvious devotion to her daughter.
After three wasted years spent imprisoned in the cocoon of his heartache and loneliness, he realized, the social man in him was on the verge of reaching out again. He had to admit, the idea was more than a little frightening. Meanwhile, in his practiced and usually infallible judgment, her daughter had contracted something more serious than a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.
With an unmistakable air of authority that swept past Jess’s weakened defenses, Stephen crouched to lay his wrist against the child’s forehead and feel her neck with strong but gently probing fingers. Brief though it was, the latter exam caused her to wince. And no wonder, Stephen thought with a slight shake of his head. She had swollen glands, and doubtless a sore throat. Though he couldn’t be sure without a thermometer, he estimated her temperature at one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts.
He made a production of examining her knee, as well. Producing a brightly colored stick-on bandage from the pocket of his tweed sport jacket, where he always carried them for his younger patients, he applied it to the child’s injured knee as if it were a badge of honor before getting to his feet.
“Better?” he asked.
Distracted from her fever and the pain of her injury by the bandage’s novelty, Annie managed a shy “I guess so” as she stared up at the tall, blond stranger. She quickly added a polite “Thank you,” at Jess’s prompting.
“Your daughter has swollen glands and a temperature,” Stephen added, gazing directly into Jess’s dark-fringed brown eyes. “Hadn’t you better take her to a doctor?”
Tempted for a hot moment to abandon her us-against-the-world stance and let herself lean on this blond Viking of a physician who had invaded their privacy as if he owned it, Jess felt anger, tinged with panic, flow through her veins. What was he doing, exactly? Accusing her of negligence? Or attempting to secure a new patient?
“I would if we had one here in the U.S.,” she snapped, then crumbled as Annie shivered slightly. “We just got here from England day before yesterday, and the weather’s much chillier than I expected,” she added almost apologetically, drawing her daughter close. “I’m afraid Annie’s cardigan’s not warm enough….”
Stephen didn’t hesitate. “Here…take my coat,” he insisted, shrugging off his tweed sport jacket and wrapping it warmly about Annie’s shoulders. “Did you come by car?”
Jess nodded, overwhelmed by his take-charge manner and, now that she’d dropped her defenses, more than a little grateful for his intercession.
“Show me where it’s parked,” he offered. “I’ll carry her.”
With her mother at the tall stranger’s side, evincing approval, Annie didn’t protest when Stephen lifted her in his arms. Instead, she seemed to wrap her arms about the blond doctor’s neck and nestle against his tan oxford-cloth shirt as if she belonged there, as if she appreciated his fatherliness.
It was just an illusion, of course, fostered by Jess’s anxiety that she wouldn’t be equal to managing Annie’s medical crisis on her own, not to mention her residual pain over the fact that Annie’s father had so seldom evinced an interest in the girl. Instead of reading stories and taking their precious five-year-old on outings, Ronald Holmes had spent most of his free time chasing other women and driving fast cars while under the influence.
As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. If they could just find a marrow donor…
Their little procession of three had reached her rental car and, squaring her shoulders, Jess fitted her key in the door on the passenger side. Taking Annie from his arms and placing her inside, she exchanged his jacket for the heavy woolen shawl she’d left on the seat and returned it to him.
“We’ll be fine now,” she told him, gazing up into his sky-colored eyes. “Thanks for your help.”
Stephen shrugged off her gratitude with a polite murmur. Of his two chief emotions—a half-formed wish to see her again and his strong concern for her child—the latter took precedence. “Where are you staying?” he asked.
Again the multitude of news stories Jess had seen on the telly about the explosion of crime in American cities caused her to hesitate. Still, the man was a physician, if he was to be believed. And he seemed so kind, despite his pervasive air of loneliness.
“We’re at the Radisson Plaza in downtown Minneapolis,” she admitted impulsively.
Stephen nodded his approval. It was a first-rate hotel, with excellent service. Though he’d never slept in one of the rooms, he’d spent time there himself, at half a dozen medical conferences. She and her daughter were in good hands.
“In that case, you’re just a short distance from Minneapolis General Hospital, which has a superb emergency room, as well as a topflight pediatric center. If you don’t choose to consult the hotel doctor, you can take your daughter there. The concierge will be able to give you directions. In the meantime, aspirin, plenty of rest, fluids and a cold washcloth for her forehead should be fairly safe bets.”
The prescriptive nature of his remarks was softened by a downward tug of smile, as if he were well aware that she hadn’t asked for his advice and might not welcome it. Juxtaposed with his take-charge manner, the slight diffidence was charming. For half a second, Jess found herself tempted to ask his name and how to contact him.
It wouldn’t do, of course. Annie had to be her first and only priority. Still, she couldn’t help staring up at him in surprise. Imbued with wariness up to her eyeballs as a result of Ronald’s infidelity, and totally preoccupied with Annie’s welfare, she hadn’t expected this rush of attraction and interest.
Thanking him again, she buckled Annie’s seat belt and got behind the wheel. A moment later, she was driving away. Motionless in the parking lot, with its rows of automobiles and its scattering of potholes, Stephen stared after them. It isn’t likely I’ll run into them again in a metropolitan area this size, he thought, even if they stay awhile, unless she brings her daughter to Minn-Gen for treatment. Shrugging on his jacket again and thrusting his hands into its pockets as he strode toward his Mercedes, he told himself it was for the best. Yet he couldn’t deny that his inner man regretted it.
The moment they reached their hotel, Jess escorted Annie upstairs to their suite, gave her a child-size aspirin with some orange juice from the minibar and tucked her into bed with the cold washcloth that Stephen had suggested on her forehead. “Try to take a little nap,” she whispered, leaning over to kiss her daughter’s cheek. “I’m sure that, when you wake up, you’ll feel much better. We can watch a children’s show together.”
Unappeased, Annie clung to her. “It’s a bore being sick all the time, Mummy,” she said. “And I miss Herkie. Can’t we just go home?”
The question tugged painfully at Jess’s heartstrings. Herkie, short for Herkimer, was Annie’s pet Scottish terrier, to whom she was extremely devoted. They’d been forced to leave the dog behind with Jess’s cousin when they traveled to the U.S. The parting had left Annie desolate.
“I know, darling…. I miss Herkie, too,” Jess agreed, attempting to comfort her. “But you know Cousin Amanda is taking especially good care of him. I promise…we’ll go home to England just as soon as we can find somebody to give you that special treatment we talked about.”
Her eyes bright with fever, Annie considered her mother’s statement. “Will it really make me better?” she asked.
On occasion, bone-marrow transplants had been known to fail. However, the technology was improving by the minute. Jess wouldn’t let herself entertain the possibility of defeat. The trick was to find a donor.
“Good as new,” she promised. “Try to sleep a little, won’t you, sweetheart?”
While Annie dozed beneath a blanket, with the hotel bedspread for added warmth, Jess curled up on a love seat in the adjoining sitting room and occupied herself by jotting down the phone numbers of several twenty-four-hour walk-in clinics. She also looked up the number for Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. As she did so, images of the tall blond doctor who had befriended them at the zoo drifted through her head.
Annie was still awake when Jess checked on her, half an hour later. Though her fever had receded somewhat, it wasn’t gone altogether. The thermometer Jess gently inserted in her ear continued to register a slight temperature. To her surprise, Annie was hungry.
“Can we get cheeseburgers, Mummy? Like we saw on the telly?” the five-year-old asked.
Against her better judgment, Jess ordered cheeseburgers and milk for two from room service. She wasn’t surprised, just saddened, when Annie ate just several bites of her sandwich and pushed her plate aside. She tried to take comfort in the fact that the girl had drunk most of her milk and seemed ready to snuggle beneath the covers again.
Maybe she’d feel better in the morning. If so, Jess planned to head for the public library. Lacking phone numbers, she might be able to locate addresses for several of the Fortunes by poring through the Minneapolis city directory. Feathering a gentle kiss on Annie’s cheek, she returned to the sitting room and switched on the television, adjusting the sound to a barely audible level.
Having stopped by his office to handle an emergency appointment after leaving the zoo and gone on to complete his late-afternoon rounds at Minn-Gen, Stephen was back behind the wheel of his sleek sedan, listening to light classical music on the radio as he drove toward his home on the wooded shore of Lake Travis, in the Minneapolis suburbs.
Some people would say I have everything—a medical degree, an expensive car, a striking contemporary house with a view of the water, he thought with a familiar tug of irony and loneliness as he turned off the two-lane highway that led into what was referred to locally as “the village” and crossed the rustic bridge that spanned the creek that fed the lake. Well, they’d be wrong. Though he cared deeply about each of his patients and genuinely loved his work, his son’s death had eviscerated his personal life; for the past three years, it had been as empty as a discarded shell washed up on a beach, bereft of its former inhabitant.
Yet as he passed the former home of Benjamin and Kate Fortune, half-hidden behind its screen of mature firs and oaks, and proceeded the half mile or so along Forest Road to his own somewhat less imposing gate-posts, he realized that a Rubicon of sorts had been crossed. Hesitant though he was to give his heart a second time to either child or woman, he’d allowed the mother and daughter he met at the zoo to open a chink in his armor. Into it had flowed an uncomfortable host of half-coveted possibilities.
No need to get bent out of shape just yet, he thought wryly. It isn’t likely you’ll see them again.
Set well back from the road, with its deck and its broad expanse of windows facing the lake, Stephen’s cedar-sided house appeared somewhat closed and unwelcoming. Raising the garage door with his remote control, he drove inside and shut off the Mercedes’s engine.
Each time he ascended the shallow quarry-tiled steps that led into the silent, empty kitchen, he experienced a moment of heartache that there was no David to greet him, no eight-year-old clamoring for his attention. Some evenings, he couldn’t stop himself from going to the doorway of his son’s former room and touching the toy cars, plastic action figures and stuffed animals that lined the built-in shelving in unnaturally neat rows.
Tonight, he switched on some music, popped a packet of frozen lasagna into the oven and poured himself a glass of Bardolino. At this time of year, the sun set around 7:30 p.m. Chelsea and Carter Todd, the young daughter and son of his next-door neighbors, were still playing outdoors, under the watchful eye of their sixtyish baby-sitter. Stepping out on the deck to sip his wine while the lasagna heated, Stephen stared at the blue expanse of water that fanned out from his pier and wondered if the laughter of another child, a different woman, would help to make him whole again.
In the sitting room area of her downtown hotel suite, Jess had drifted off to sleep. She awoke shortly after 10:00 p.m., stiff from the unnatural position in which she’d been slumbering on the love seat, and somewhat unsettled, thanks to a confusing dream. Annie was still asleep, her forehead warm and dry against the back of Jess’s wrist, but not excessively feverish.
Deciding to let her sleep, Jess poured out a glass of mineral water and returned to the sitting room. The local news was on. Someone handed the sandy-haired anchorman a note as she retook her seat. It was clear from his facial expression as he scanned it that he considered the note to be of major importance, and she turned up the sound a little.
“This just in,” the man was saying. “Former Hollywood leading lady and longtime Minneapolis resident Monica Malone was found dead this evening in her Summit Avenue mansion. We take you to Mary Ann Galvin, our reporter at the scene. Mary Ann…”
Positioned at the curb in front of the Malone mansion, which had clearly seen better days, the reporter gripped her microphone with barely disguised excitement. Several uniformed officers, the flashing lights of a police cruiser and a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape were visible behind her.
“Thank you, Jay,” she said. “According to a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, Miss Malone, thought to be in her midsixties, was found sprawled on her living room floor shortly after 10:00 p.m. She was pronounced dead at 10:15 p.m., when police arrived.
“Stating that the matter is under investigation, officers have declined to comment on the cause of death, or speculate as to whether foul play was involved. However, a tenant of one of Miss Malone’s neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had heard she suffered a head injury….”
The name of the deceased former movie star rang a bell with Jess, and not just because of her films. I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere, and recently—I know it, she thought. Seconds later, she remembered where. Monica Malone’s name had turned up in a long-outdated, somewhat sensationalized magazine article about Benjamin Fortune’s career that she managed to dig up at a library near her home in England before leaving for America. Its author, who claimed to have known the Fortune patriarch personally, had suggested that he and Monica Malone had “conducted an off-and-on affair for years.”
In part because of Ronald’s infidelities during their marriage, Jess supposed, she strongly disapproved. Yet she couldn’t have denied that she found every scrap of information she could accumulate about the man she now believed to have been her grandfather extremely fascinating.
When Jess awoke again, around 6:30 a.m., Annie was worse. Her temperature had soared to 103 degrees. She was coughing, shivering and whimpering. Terrified, Jess decided to take the advice of the tall blond doctor they’d met at the zoo and take her to Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. However, she didn’t think she could bear to see Annie carted off in an ambulance if it wasn’t necessary. It would scare her to death and, incidentally, break Jess’s heart.
Accordingly, she bundled the girl up in two sweaters and a raincoat, and wrapped her in one of the hotel blankets. A sympathetic bellhop helped her carry Annie downstairs and summoned a taxi for them.
“Mummy… Mummy…where are we going? You’re coming with me…aren’t you?” Annie asked in alarm as the bellhop settled her in the cab’s back seat.
“Yes, of course I am. We’re going to the hospital that nice doctor told us about yesterday,” Jess said soothingly, unable to keep tears of consternation and panic from running down her cheeks as she got into the taxi beside her and drew her close. “You need better medicine than I can give you, darling. Plus some doctors and nurses to help make you better as soon as possible.”
Both she and Annie were grim-faced, tense and more than a little frightened as their cab drew up to Minn-Gen’s emergency room entrance. Before Jess could get out and pay the driver, a nurse and an orderly were hurrying out to meet them. “You’re Mrs. Holmes, right?” the nurse asked. “The doorman at your hotel phoned to let us know you were coming.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur. While the nurse examined Annie and took her vital signs, one of the secretaries at the nursing station helped Jess fill out an admitting form. The latter didn’t seem unduly concerned about Annie’s condition until Jess wrote leukemia under the heading Known Medical Conditions. A quick conference between the secretary, a nurse and a male physician who was in the process of tending to an accident victim ensued.
“You’d better page Dr. Todd,” the male physician decided, adding for Jess’s benefit, “She’s a pediatrician. I think I saw her come in earlier. She’s probably still in-house.”
With barely a skipped beat, the name of Dr. Lindsay Todd and the words “to the ER, stat” were being read over the hospital’s public address system.
Jess barely had time to smooth Annie’s forehead and whisper a few calming words to her before Dr. Todd appeared. Brown-haired, leggy, sweet-faced, in her mid-to-late thirties and decidedly feminine looking despite her white coat and stethoscope, she was crisp but extraordinarily kind and gentle as she gave Annie a thorough going-over and peppered Jess with questions.
The exam finished, Dr. Todd patted Annie’s hand and turned to Jess with a concerned frown. “I’d like to run some tests…get her white-cell count, check on the number of immature cells, that sort of thing,” she announced. “Or rather, I’d like to have an expert do it. As it happens, we’re in luck. Dr. Hunter’s in the building.”
Jess knew what the tests were likely to show. Though she suddenly felt very far from home indeed, maybe it was for the best that Annie’s crisis had occurred in Minneapolis. Maybe these energetic can-do Americans could keep Annie alive until she could find a donor.
“All right,” she whispered.
“Good. You two hang in there.”
Exiting Annie’s cubicle, Dr. Todd pulled the curtain shut. At her request, the hospital operator paged Dr. Hunter. Called back to the hospital around 5:00 a.m., after a restless night, when an elderly patient suffering from polycythemia, a condition in which the body makes too many red blood cells, causing the blood to thicken excessively, had taken a turn for the worse, he’d barely had time to shave. His blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue as he strode into the emergency room.
“What can I do for you, Lin?” he asked.
The brown-haired pediatrician quickly filled him in on what she knew of Annie’s condition. “The mother’s been told she needs a bone-marrow transplant,” she said.
Stephen nodded. “Let’s have a look at her.”
A moment later, with Lindsay Todd following closely in his wake, he was pushing aside the curtain that screened Annie’s cubicle.
Jess’s eyes widened as she glanced up at him. “You!” she exclaimed in surprise, unable to stop herself.
Two
Stephen’s heart lurched with surprise, regret, and a strong sensation of déjà vu. On some deeper level, he supposed, he should have known the acute leukemia patient Lindsay had summoned him to examine would turn out to be the feverish blond child who’d skinned her knee at the zoo, accompanied by her lovely but worried dark-haired mother. The possibility likely would have occurred to him, if he hadn’t been so gosh-darn tired and failed to scan the personal information on the child’s chart, which almost certainly included a permanent address in England.
He did so now, with a quick downward glance.
“Hello again, uh, Mrs. Holmes…Annabel…” he said, extending his hand to Jess and lightly ruffling Annie’s hair as he assumed his professional role like a coat of armor. “Under the circumstances, I won’t say I’m happy to see you, though I’m pleased you decided to take my advice and come here. This is a very good hospital.”
Aware of Lindsay’s confusion, he added, “I met Mrs. Holmes and Annabel yesterday at Como Park Zoo.”
“Oh,” Lindsay murmured. “I see.”
It was clear that she didn’t—that she couldn’t begin to imagine why, lacking a child to accompany him, he’d taken refuge from his busy but lonely life at a typical children’s haunt. He wasn’t in a position to explain. Nor would he have wished to, in any event.
“Let’s see how this young lady’s doing this morning,” he proposed instead, picking up his stethoscope.
The exam, which included numerous questions and a great deal of gentle prodding and observation on Stephen’s part, took several minutes. It wasn’t difficult for him to see that Annie was very sick indeed. He could almost have guessed what her white-cell count would be. Her English doctors had been correct in stating that she needed a transplant as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t just place an order for matching bone marrow as if it could be purchased from a catalogue. With just one in twenty thousand unrelated persons eligible to donate, from a genetic standpoint, and a paucity of registered and blood-typed volunteers, it could be difficult, bordering on impossible, to find a donor.
While they were searching, Annabel Holmes would likely need some form of chemotherapy as a stopgap measure. “No luck finding a donor for your daughter in England, I take it?” he asked Jess.
She shook her head. “That’s why we came to the U.S.”
Why Minneapolis in particular? he wondered. Does she have people here? There wasn’t time to ask. He was being paged again. To him, the brief request to call the nursing station on 301 West was shorthand for the fact that Mrs. Munson, the elderly polycythemia patient, needed him again.
“I’ve got to run upstairs for a few minutes,” he said. “In the meantime, Mrs. Holmes, I’d like to have the nurses here admit your daughter as my patient, with Dr. Todd as pediatric consultant, and assign her to a room. I’ll need your permission to run some tests so we can determine what her current status is…bone-marrow aspiration and biopsy, X rays, an electrocardiogram, blood and pulmonary-function tests, that sort of thing. I’ll be in touch just as soon as her results are available. Okay? Naturally, we’ll sign her up at once with every available U.S. registry.”
Annie’s illness was rapidly approaching a crisis point, as Jess had already begun to sense. Her little girl would die or, if a miracle was in the offing, she’d get better. It was that simple, and that terrifying. Except for their quest to find a donor among Benjamin Fortune’s descendents, her prospects weren’t bright. Barely contained panic causing a lump to settle in her throat, she nodded without answering him.
A sensitive barometer to everything Jess was thinking and feeling, Annie picked up on her fear at once. “Do I have to stay here?” she chimed in worriedly, gazing up at the tall blond doctor she’d trusted without hesitation the previous afternoon. “Can’t I go back with Mummy to the hotel?”
“I’m afraid it’s the hospital for you, sweetheart,” Stephen said, smiling in an attempt to hide his own consternation over the likely severity of her case. “We need to have you handy, so we can do our best to make you better.”
She appeared to think over his explanation and accept it. “Well, could I have another of those cool bandages, then?” she asked with five-year-old straightforwardness.
He didn’t make a production of asking where it hurt—just produced the requested bounty from the pocket of his lab coat and solemnly affixed it to the back of her hand, as if it were a good-conduct medal. A moment later, after ordering the tests he’d outlined, along with an antibiotic drip to help Annie’s compromised immune system combat her current infection, he was gone.
Jess couldn’t stop herself from shaking.
Lindsay rested a hand on her shoulder. “Dr. Hunter’s the best hematologist around, bar none, and I’m not just saying that because we’re friends and neighbors,” she vowed. “Your daughter’s in good hands.”
West of the city, in the posh, handsomely appointed master bedroom where Erica Fortune, Jacob Fortune’s estranged wife, slept alone, the bedside phone rang sharply. It was going on 7:40 a.m., a bit early for fifty-one-year-old Erica to be up in her previous incarnation as the pampered but increasingly unhappy mate of Fortune Industries’ chief executive officer, who’d succeeded his widowed mother following her fatal light-plane crash in the Brazilian jungle.
These days, as a woman alone bent on finding herself, if not exactly thrilled that her husband had walked out on her, the sleek, silvery-blond Erica rose early. Nibbling on cinnamon toast and drinking black coffee as she dressed for a 9:00 a.m. Saturday class at Normandale Junior College in Bloomington, she reached for the receiver and murmured an absent hello.
Her green eyes widened when her caller identified himself as Lieutenant J. B. Rosczak, a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department.
“Is this the Jacob Fortune residence?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure how to answer him. “Yes,” she agreed tentatively, setting her coffee cup aside. “I mean, it was, until a few months ago. This is Mrs. Fortune. Jacob Fortune and I are separated. What’s this about, anyway?”
Seemingly reluctant to discuss the matter with her in any detail, the police lieutenant ignored her question. “I take it he’s not there, then, ma’am?” he said.
“No, he isn’t,” Erica confirmed.
“Any idea where we can contact him?”
It was beginning to sound as if Jake were in some kind of trouble. Standing there in her sheer panty hose, lacy undergarments and partially buttoned silk blouse, with her toes curling into the plush beige carpeting, Erica took a hurried moment to think. Should she answer in the negative, and try to reach Jake the moment her caller hung up the phone? Of course, that would mean telling an out-and-out falsehood. Though she continued to have protective feelings toward Jake—still loved him, in a guarded way, if she was willing to admit the truth, she didn’t want to lie to the police on his account.
“Actually, he’s been living in his late mother’s house, up on Lake Travis, since our breakup,” she said.
“We’ve already looked there,” Detective Rosczak answered brusquely. “Any other ideas?”
Erica didn’t have any. “Maybe one of our children would know,” she speculated. “Or his secretary at Fortune Industries. Of course, she won’t be in her office until Monday. Please… can’t you tell me what’s wrong? Though we’re separated, I still care about him.”
The line was empty of conversation for a moment, as Detective Rosczak apparently decided whether or not to answer her question. “He’s wanted for questioning in the death of Monica Malone, ma’am,” he admitted at last.
Erica gasped. “Monica…dead?” she repeated in astonishment. “Where? When? How did it happen?” A ghastly thought struck her. “Surely she wasn’t murdered!”
It was clear from the detective’s tone that he was more than ready for their conversation to end. “Maybe you should turn on the morning news, if you want that kind of information, Mrs. Fortune,” he suggested.
Before saying goodbye, he made a point of giving her a number to call if Jake surfaced. “It would be better for him if he got in touch with us voluntarily,” he advised. The implied threat was hard to miss.
Erica was stunned as she put down the phone. Her first impulse was to call Natalie—at twenty-seven, the third-oldest of the five children she’d had with Jake. Natalie lived in an aging farmhouse that had been converted into a duplex, directly across Lake Travis from the mansion that had once belonged to Ben and Kate Fortune—which also happened to be Jake’s current residence. She and her father had always been close. Since he’d moved into his parents’ home, following his split with Erica, Natalie had crossed the lake on a regular basis to visit him. Maybe she knew something.
About to punch the speed-dial button she’d programmed with Natalie’s number, Erica ran one elegantly manicured hand through her silver-blond bob. It might be better to phone Sterling Foster, the family’s longtime attorney and respected legal advisor, first. If Jake was in a bind and the police had become involved, Sterling would know how to handle it.
It was Saturday. He wouldn’t be at his office so Erica rummaged in her desk drawer for her leather-bound address book. Finding it, she located Sterling’s home number.
The attorney was just getting out of the shower. He hadn’t read the morning paper yet. Or made contact with his first cup of coffee. He answered on the third ring, gruff because of the early call and the necessity of answering it wrapped in a bath towel.
“Hello?” he growled, adjusting the towel so that he wouldn’t drip all over on the carpet.
She tried not to sound too worried, knowing he wouldn’t like it. “Sterling?” she said. “Hi, it’s Erica. Sorry to disturb you at home, especially on the weekend. But I just got a call from Detective Rosczak of the Minneapolis police. Monica Malone has died, and the police want to question Jake about it. They can’t seem to find him. It’s possible he might be in some kind of trouble.”
Though he hadn’t heard of Monica’s death, Sterling didn’t evince surprise. “Sounds like it,” he answered dryly. “But then, when hasn’t he been in some mess or another, lately?”
Erica was irritated at what she considered to be his cavalier attitude, and still ready to spring to the defense of the man who was still her husband. She didn’t consider an inquiry from the police a laughing matter. “You have contacts in the department, don’t you?” she asked, her soft, cultivated voice taking on a more strident note. “I want you to call them…find out what’s going on. And find Jake! If he disappears when the police need to talk to him, he’s bound to look guilty of something!”
Dropping the towel, which he no longer needed, Sterling reached for his bathrobe. “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll do what I can. Go back to bed and stop worrying. If you plan to go husband-hunting after all these years, you’re going to need your beauty sleep.”
Touchy on the subject of her breakup with Jake, not to mention her age, which, despite her still-youthful classic good looks, she didn’t consider an asset, Erica considered the remark a put-down. It sent her through the roof. “Sorry to shatter one of your treasured clichés about me, but I’m getting ready for a Saturday-morning class!” she snapped, slamming down the receiver.
A tight sensation in her chest, she quickly called Natalie for emotional support. For his part, Sterling started to dial Kate, the spirited family matriarch whom he knew to be alive and well, though her family believed otherwise.
Seconds later, he changed his mind. Instead of phoning, he’d drive to her current hideaway, a penthouse apartment atop the renovated LaSalle building in downtown Minneapolis. She owed him breakfast, dammit. The last time she’d offered him brunch in conjunction with a business discussion, his ulcer had been kicking up. He hadn’t been able to partake. Devoid of sympathy, she’d devoured her blintzes and strawberries under his nose with her typical gusto.
He decided to have a look at the morning paper first. Wincing slightly, he saw that Monica’s death had made the front page, above the fold. Described as “still under investigation,” it had been given a banner headline. A photo of the aging star, taken in better days, accompanied the text.
Scanning the story, which had been written by a reporter he considered competent, Sterling learned that Monica had been stabbed several times in the chest. She had also suffered an injury to her left temple. Signs of a struggle had been evident. Several of Monica’s Summit Avenue neighbors had seen a man leaving her mansion shortly before her maid returned and found her body. No description of the caller seemed to be available, at least to journalists.
Damn, Sterling thought, tossing the paper aside. What was Jake doing there? The woman was poison. It’s bad enough that Ben was fool enough to mess around with her. Reluctantly he admitted that Erica had a valid point. Kate’s oldest son might turn out to be in some very hot water.
Though she’d probably heard the news of Monica’s death by now, he doubted Kate had any inkling of her son’s involvement. If she did, he reasoned, she’d have phoned him immediately. No, Jake’s name hadn’t appeared in the news. And Detective Rosczak, whoever he was, hadn’t gotten in touch with her, because he didn’t know of her existence.
She wouldn’t have a clue.
It would be Sterling’s job to break the news. Brushing his teeth, he shaved and put on a crisp white shirt, a maroon silk tie, gray sharkskin slacks and one of his expensive but conservative cardigan sweaters. A few minutes later, with his thick white hair impeccably combed and an unobtrusive Patek-Philippe watch adorning his left wrist, he was taking the elevator down to the basement garage of his condominium apartment building and striding purposefully toward his maroon Lincoln Town Car.
The LaSalle, a twelve-story brick-and-stone building dating from 1920, had been built in a style Sterling thought of as Mississippi River Valley Gothic. It had originally served as Minneapolis’s YMCA. In recent years, its sturdy shell and somewhat decrepit interior had been exquisitely restored to contain thirty or so smallish, extremely private luxury apartments. You needed a key to operate the elevator. There were no nameplates—just numbers—beside the theft-proof mailboxes.
A child of the Depression era who’d grown up at a time when twelve stories constituted a fairly tall building, Sterling liked its cozy size, black-and-white terrazzo lobby, clubby woodwork and art deco details. He suspected Kate was similarly minded. Having moved around a great deal to avoid detection since she’d faked her death, she’d rented the LaSalle’s top floor several months earlier. It was divided into two penthouse apartments. Hers, luxuriously carpeted and decorated, boasted several skylights, a small fireplace and a sweeping bird’s-eye view of western Minneapolis and its adjacent suburbs.
As he backed his Lincoln into an empty space at the curb and went inside, Sterling thought about the strange set of circumstances that had prompted him and Kate to agree on the extraordinary step of letting her family believe she had perished. Had they done the right thing? Or were they fools to think their scheme would help them flush out a would-be kidnapper or murderer?
As yet, it had been spectacularly unsuccessful. For perhaps the thousandth time, he puzzled over the identity of the hijacker who had stowed away in Kate’s plane on her solo trip to a remote Brazilian village in search of a key ingredient for the Secret Youth Formula she was trying to develop for Fortune Cosmetics, then appeared in midflight to hold a gun to her head. The plane had gone into a nosedive in the ensuing struggle. By some miracle, Kate had been thrown free, to fall through the dense undergrowth, moments before it crashed and burned.
In Sterling’s opinion, her attacker had been a killer-for-hire, in the pay of some unknown enemy. It was fair to say he’d probably never be identified. His badly charred remains had been taken for those of Kate by the Brazilian authorities. Meanwhile, having suffered a concussion, multiple fractures and countless cuts and bruises, Kate had been found and nursed slowly back to health by the natives of a remote Amazon village.
Aware that someone had wanted her dead, and might try again if they realized they’d failed, she’d disguised herself when finally she was well enough to travel, and made her way back to Minneapolis with extreme caution. Sterling would never forget the morning she’d phoned, her husky voice laced with fear and umbrage as she whispered into the receiver, “I’m alive, Sterling. I’m alive. Don’t tell anyone.”
Though he had a key, Sterling knocked at Kate’s apartment door instead of letting himself in, as he sometimes did, since he hadn’t taken the trouble to call first. Kate let him in. Clad in a red Chinese-silk bathrobe that flattered her small, slim figure and complemented, rather than clashed with, her upswept silver-streaked auburn hair, she clutched a mug of black coffee in one diamond-studded fist as she led him to the living room and a breaking news program on the television.
“Sterling…come in! You’re never going to believe this!” she commanded, waving him peremptorily to a chair.
The story that had captured her attention was the same one Jessica Holmes had caught the evening before and Sterling had scanned in his morning paper—expanded as more details and peripheral interviews became available. Unlike Jess, Kate had a strong personal interest in the case. Recruited by her many years earlier to act as a spokeswoman for Fortune Cosmetics, Monica had repaid the favor by conducting an illicit on-again, off-again affair with Kate’s husband, Ben, for years. Or at least that was what Kate suspected. Further, she had long sensed Monica to be a deadly personal adversary.
“It’s Monica Malone!” Kate added. “She’s been stabbed to death!”
Given a cup of coffee by the maid, Sterling scowled as a news commentator recapped the story. But he couldn’t hide his growing concern. If Jake was involved in some way, he’d find himself facing an extremely nasty situation.
Kate hadn’t picked up on his worry yet. “So…what do you think of all this?” she asked, her color high, as the station took an advertising break. “You know I’m not the vindictive type…that I wouldn’t wish a rattlesnake harm unless it was about to strike. But I can’t help feeling that what happened to Monica is at least partly her own fault.”
Sterling’s mouth failed to twitch with his usual amusement at her inventive turn of phrase. “I think Jake may have been mixed up in it somehow,” he answered.
“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked in alarm, turning her penetrating blue gaze full force on him.
As succinctly as possible, he described Erica’s call. “I’m just guessing, of course,” he said. “But it’s conceivable Jake visited Monica yesterday evening, and that it was he whom her neighbors spotted leaving the house shortly before her body was discovered. Otherwise, why would the police be looking for him?”
Kate’s brightly lacquered nails dug into the arms of her chair. “You’re not saying he killed her, are you?” she exclaimed.
“You know better than that.”
According to Sterling’s retelling of his conversation with Erica, Jake hadn’t spent the night in the Lake Travis house, where he’d taken up residence after their split. Where was he, then? Had he made himself scarce for a reason? Kate didn’t want to believe it. The Jake she knew couldn’t possibly be guilty of harming anyone.
“There could be any number of reasons the police want to speak with him,” she hedged.
“Give me one.”
“I don’t know…recent business dealings, maybe. He sold her that stock, remember, though God knows what his reasons were. No doubt there were meetings, phone calls. They’re probably combing the woodwork, hoping someone can give them something.”
Sterling shook his head. “I don’t buy it. This feels like trouble to me…right down to the core.”
It did to Kate, too. Her instincts in full flush, she was on her feet, pacing. “Damn that woman to hell…even if she’s probably headed there already!” she erupted. “She had her hooks into Ben for years. Now, as her swan song, she’s going to destroy my oldest child!”
From Sterling’s perspective, it was incomprehensible that Ben had ever preferred Monica to Kate, even as a side dish. Despite her impoverished beginnings, Kate was a genuine thoroughbred. And full of fire still; he’d have bet his stock-market holdings on that.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
She wanted him to protect Jake. Run interference for him with the police. Keep him from doing something foolish. Much as she loved her son, she knew his weaknesses. If he realized he was being sought by the authorities, he might panic. Yet he couldn’t call on her for support—he didn’t know she was alive. And he was too proud to call Erica. But he might get in touch with Sterling if he found himself in a jam. Maybe he’d tried to do so already.
“My dear, dear friend…please, go home and wait for him to call you,” she begged. “Keep the line open, just in case. Let me know when you hear from him.”
A bit grumpily, because he’d planned on having breakfast with her, Sterling arose. “As always, I’m at your service,” he murmured.
“If he calls, you’ll go with him to the police.”
“Of course.”
Though he doubted she’d make a habit of it, Kate surprised him with a swift, spontaneous hug before ushering him out the door.
Jake awoke in a run-down motel, with a sour taste in his mouth. He’d drunk to excess the night before—he knew that much. His stomach felt like crap, and his head was pounding. Seconds later, the painful throbbing of his injured shoulder brought back the whole frightening, humiliating scenario that had taken place. Groaning, he shut his eyes as the details of what he’d been running from invaded his memory and settled there. The argument with Monica. Her coming at him with a letter opener. A thrust of pain that had made him gasp. Him pushing her away, and her falling against the marble fireplace…
Like a fool, or some desperate kind of idiot, he’d gone to her house to confront her over the way she’d been blackmailing him—threatening to reveal to the world that his father was a poor slob of a foot soldier who’d died in World War II, not the self-made, illustrious Benjamin Fortune, who’d married his mother and placed a silver spoon in his mouth.
It was news his power-hungry half brother, Nate, would glory in hearing, and Jake had been determined to keep it from him at all costs. He should have known Monica would refuse to return the stock he’d sold her under duress, or promise to keep his secret—that she’d try something crazy, like trying to kill or injure him.
Because of her insane and jealous machinations, he’d all but destroyed the company his family had taken a half century to build, and lost most of the respect he’d once had for himself. Now she was dead, a corpse discovered lying facedown on her living room floor, according to the news account he’d watched before bolting from his parents’ former Lake Travis house the night before.
I didn’t kill her! he thought frantically. I know I didn’t! She was alive when I left. She’d regained consciousness, and I’d helped her to the sofa. I should have stuck around, I suppose. Phoned for help and stayed until it arrived. But she didn’t seem to be hurt that badly. She was shouting gutter language at me, threatening to come at me again, and I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.
Who had killed her then? Jake didn’t have a clue, any more than he knew whether someone had seen him leave the house. If his departure had been observed, he might not have been recognized. Yet his fingerprints would be all over the scene. His blood, too, he guessed, would have dripped from the wound in his shoulder. Plus, she’d scratched him. Bits of his skin would be found beneath her long red fingernails. His DNA would be everywhere. If he’d been placed by someone at the property near the time of death, the police would be looking for him. He’d be facing a mountain of evidence.
Fear congealing like an undigested meal in his gut, he got out of bed and paid an overdue visit to the bathroom. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn the night before—thankfully, the clean pullover and slacks he’d changed into following the shower he’d taken at his daughter Natalie’s insistence, not the torn and blood-soaked shirt and soiled trousers he’d stuffed into an upstairs bathroom hamper. Unfortunately, his breath still smelled of Scotch. And he didn’t have any toothpaste.
He shook his head. What must Natalie have thought when she came across the lake and discovered him, wounded, drunk and babbling? Now that he’d disappeared, she must be worried sick. Somehow, he’d have to make it up to her.
In the meantime, he’d concentrate on getting out of the mess he was in. For one thing, he didn’t know precisely where he was. He only knew that, after learning of Monica’s death, he’d hit the road and driven for hours, stopping finally at a run-down motel somewhere in Wisconsin’s north country.
A quick scan of the checkout card revealed that he’d spent the night at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake, near the town of Hayward. It occurred to him that, under the circumstances, his out-of-state flight wouldn’t look good. He might need legal representation.
Though it seemed like years since he’d run from Monica’s house and sped away in his car, less than twenty-four hours had elapsed. It was Saturday. Sterling Foster wasn’t likely to be in his office. Racking his brain, Jake managed to come up with his home number and dial it with trembling fingers.
After leaving Kate’s apartment, Sterling had returned home. But he hadn’t stayed put, the way he planned. Instead, a worried call from Natalie had propelled him to her house, across Lake Travis from the Fortune mansion. She had things to tell him about Jake’s involvement with Monica the night before—things she didn’t feel comfortable confiding over the telephone.
Annoyed that he had to go when Kate had suggested he remain at home and make himself available for Jake’s call, he’d quickly decided the trip had been worth it when he heard Natalie’s tale of an argument between Jake and Monica at her house, possibly over blackmail, Monica’s fall and Jake’s assertion that he’d cut his shoulder. According to the secondhand information he’d received from her, the aging star had been alive and ready to continue their argument when Jake left the house. As for his comments about blackmail, Jake hadn’t been specific. In fact, he’d backed off from them.
His claim that Monica had been alive when he left had alleviated the lawyer’s concern only a little. Coupled with the fact of her death, the circumstances Jake had described to his daughter spelled big trouble for him, in his opinion. Kate had thought so, too, when he reported to her on returning to his apartment shortly before 11:00 a.m.
When his phone shrilled just seconds after they finished their conversation, he picked up on the first ring. “At last!” he exclaimed in response to Jake’s tentative utterance of his name. “Where in the hell are you? Monica Malone’s murder is all over the newspapers and television. The Minneapolis Police are seeking you for questioning.”
The bottom dropping out of his feeble hope that someone else had been caught and charged with Monica’s murder, Jake told Sterling where he was. “You’ve got to believe me…I didn’t kill Monica,” he begged like a penitent child, “though we did have a run-in. She was alive when I left. Still, if the police are looking for me, I suppose I’m in a heap of trouble. I’m going to need your help.”
Sterling calculated that the motel where Jake had spent the night was roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Minneapolis. An unannounced and unaccompanied return might not be wise. It was entirely possible that the police had alerted their fellow officers throughout Minnesota and the neighboring states to be on the lookout for him. If he was arrested on his way back, or even detained for questioning, he could protest all he wanted that he’d planned to turn himself in and still not be believed.
In Sterling’s opinion, the best course of action he could take would be to drive to Wisconsin and bring Jake back, after notifying the authorities that the Fortune CEO would appear at police headquarters voluntarily that evening and answer all their questions. That way, he’d have a chance to hear the full story from Jake’s mouth—ask whatever questions he deemed necessary, and help him settle on the official version—before the detectives got a crack at him.
For Jake, the silence on Sterling’s end of the line was deafening. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “say something. Tell me what to do.”
Having decided how to handle the situation, Sterling was brisk. “Don’t go out,” he ordered. “Wait there for me. Talk to no one. I’ll phone the police when I get to Hayward and tell them I’m coming in with you…that you’ll answer their questions willingly. There’s a young man in my building who can accompany me, and drive your car back for you.”
Abject in his fear that he’d be accused of a crime he hadn’t committed, Jake quickly agreed to do whatever the attorney suggested. Breaking their connection, Sterling took a deep breath and dialed Kate. “Your son just called,” he said without preamble when she answered. “He’s in Wisconsin. I’m on my way to bring him back. On my advice, he’ll submit to questioning voluntarily. Naturally, I’ll be by his side….”
There was a brief silence on Kate’s end. “Do you think he’ll be arrested?” she asked.
Sterling was anything but sure about how to answer her. He tried to be optimistic. “I shouldn’t think so,” he opined. “Of course, I’ll know more after I talk with him in depth.”
It was the best he could offer her at the moment. Her relief, mixed with a certain amount of dread over what the future would hold, was palpable. “Sterling, thank you!” she whispered. “Without you, the family would disintegrate. Whereas I…”
Time was of the essence, and she didn’t finish the thought. “Call Erica before you go, will you, so she won’t worry too much?” she added, changing her tack. “She can get in touch with the children. Naturally, you won’t want to give her too many details.”
At the hospital, Jess had remained by her daughter’s bedside, desperately trying to think of ways to contact the Fortune family while waiting for the first of Annie’s tests to come back from the lab. A nurse entered the room around 1:00 p.m. and noted that Annie was asleep. “You’ve been here all day, since early this morning, without rest or anything to eat, Mrs. Holmes,” she pointed out. “It won’t help your daughter if you get sick, too. We’ll keep an eye on her, and Dr. Hunter will page you when the test results become available. Why don’t you run down to the cafeteria and grab a bite?”
If they could pull it off, Annie’s rehabilitation would take months. The nurse’s suggestion made sense. Realizing she was starved, Jess decided to take her up on it. She was seated in the brightly lit first-floor cafeteria, munching on a tuna-salad sandwich and drinking a cup of tea, when Stephen slid into the seat opposite her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, the panic that lay just below the surface of her thoughts staring back at him.
She was so lovely. So distraught. And so alone in Minneapolis, unless he was very much mistaken. It was all he could do not to reach across the table and pat her shoulder. “Nothing we didn’t expect,” he replied.
“Then…the results are in?”
“Some of them are. Enough to know Annabel’s white-cell count is severely out of whack, with a large number of immature, ineffective cells circulating in her bloodstream. She’s going to need a transplant, and soon, to correct the situation. As an interim measure, until we can find a donor, I want to prescribe a mild form of chemotherapy. It’ll make her fairly sick for a couple of days. But then she should have a brief remission. We’ll have a respite in which to search.”
Jess had dealt with the problem sufficiently by now to know they didn’t have any other choice. Reluctantly, because anything calculated to make Annie sicker was like a dagger in her heart, she gave her permission.
“I’ve asked my office nurse to register Annabel with all known marrow sources, including one that’s previously turned up several donors for us in Australia,” he added. “It’ll take a few weeks, maybe longer, to find out if there’s an available match.”
“And…if there isn’t?”
“Unless her remission’s far stronger than I expect, your daughter’s not a good candidate for autologous donation, the process in which a portion of the patient’s own marrow is removed, cleansed of cancer cells and replanted after the remaining cancer is killed off with chemotherapy,” he said, his gaze unwavering though it was deeply sympathetic. “We could try it, I suppose, if all else failed. But it would be risky in the extreme.”
Jess didn’t answer. There wasn’t much use in arguing the point. Annie’s doctors in England had advised strongly against the process in her case, as well.
“Mind telling me why you decided to come to Minneapolis, of all places?” he asked, changing the subject.
She supposed she might as well describe her possible connection with the Fortune family, though it hadn’t been proven yet. “When my family members—what few I have—were tested as possible donors for Annie,” she said, “those on my maternal grandfather’s side turned out to be so extremely wide of the mark that her doctors found it puzzling.
“Shortly thereafter, I was going through some things that had belonged to my late mother. An old letter fell out of a book she’d read to me as a child. To my astonishment, it suggested that my true maternal grandfather wasn’t a man named George Simpson, as I’d always believed, but rather Benjamin Fortune….”
She could tell from the look on Stephen’s face that he was taken aback and highly skeptical. Doubtless he’s convinced I’m grasping at straws, she thought. Or worse. “I have the letter right here, in my purse. I’ll be happy to show it to you,” she offered, determined that he should believe her search was motivated by Annie’s welfare, not greed, now that she’d opened up to him.
“I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
Silently she took it out and handed it to him.
From what Stephen could determine, the letter appeared to be genuine. It was entirely possible that the lovely, dark-haired Englishwoman seated opposite him was a long-lost Fortune relative. The physician in him leaped at the possibilities for his patient.
“During the short time we’ve been here, I’ve done everything I could to contact someone connected with the family, to no avail,” Jess went on, when he didn’t speak. “They all seem to have unlisted numbers. Jacob Fortune’s secretary did promise she’d get a message to him. But I’m not holding my breath.”
At that, Stephen regarded her quizzically. “I gather you didn’t realize that Dr. Todd, your daughter’s new pediatrician, is a Fortune,” he remarked.
Caught by surprise, Jess could do little more than stare.
“As a matter of fact, she’s Benjamin Fortune’s daughter,” he continued. “Granted, you wouldn’t have guessed it from her name. She went by Lindsay Fortune-Todd for a while after marrying Frank Todd, another of our doctors here, then simply dropped her maiden name….”
For Jess, it was if a door had suddenly blown open on a host of possibilities. Twin spots of color blossomed in her cheeks. With a surge of excitement, she jumped to her feet. “Surely, if she knows of the connection, Dr. Todd will help us!” she exclaimed.
“Not so fast,” Stephen advised, rising also. “Lindsay and the other Fortune children lost their mother, Kate—who, as you probably know, happened to be their only remaining parent—in a plane crash last year. To potential fortune hunters, the money they inherited is like a plum, ripe for the picking. At least one young woman whom most people regard as an imposter has turned up, claiming to be Lindsay’s long-lost twin, who was kidnapped shortly after their birth, and demanding a share. Long-lost relatives of any sort are bound to be something of a sensitive issue, especially with her.”
“But…but…I don’t want money,” Jess protested. “I want…”
Taking her hands in his, Stephen caused little ripples of awareness to flutter up her arms. “Take it easy. I believe you,” he said. “Lindsay and I are friends, as well as colleagues, and next-door neighbors. I think it’s fair to say she trusts me. Why don’t you let me talk to her?”
Jess wanted to fling her arms around him. “Oh, Dr. Hunter…would you?” she asked.
“Call me Stephen,” he said. “Thanks to Annabel, or Annie, as you call her, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. C’mon, let’s go upstairs and see how she’s doing before I have to check out of here.”
Pale and wraithlike as she slept beneath her hospital blanket, Annie looked like a little-girl ghost. Her control slipping, Jess wept softly as she gazed at her daughter. “I’m so worried about her,” she confided. “She’s all I’ve got. I don’t want to lose her.”
All too well, Stephen knew how she felt. A moment later, he’d taken her in his arms. Her tears were soaking into his hospital coat. An unplanned act, the move was meant simply to comfort her, or so he told himself.
To Jess, his arms offered a place of sanctuary and trust—and, incredibly, of nurturance. She wanted to lean on him. Blend with him. Burrow against the warmth of his neck. Despite her fear and worry over Annie, she realized it was a wake-up call to the lonely, loving woman in her—a woman who’d built a fortress around her heart when she learned of her late husband’s faithlessness.
As their embrace held, Stephen found he didn’t trust himself to move, or speak. By some alchemy he’d thought long extinct, he was holding a woman who filled his arms—one who, with her obvious refinement and strong capacity for love, might be able to fill his heart, as well.
A moment later, he was withdrawing from her. He was her daughter’s hematologist, after all. Professional ethics forbade his getting involved with her, even if his track record as a comforter of women who stood to lose a child did not.
“Ummm…Mrs. Holmes, I’d better be going,” he said awkwardly, when she didn’t speak. “We’ll have a chance to talk again tomorrow. Try to get some rest.”
Settling in a chair by Annie’s bed after he left, Jess pondered the fact that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. By itself, of course, it didn’t mean anything. Yet, coupled with the air of loneliness she’d noticed at the zoo and her persistent impression that he was a man who’d known sorrow, she thought it might.
She was aware their physical contact had embarrassed him. While her reaction to it had been quite a bit different, to say the least, she hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his care of Annie. Or prompt him to forget his promise to talk to Lindsay Todd on her behalf.
Returning home to face an empty house and the remainder of a lonely, aimless Saturday afternoon, Stephen found himself going into David’s room. On impulse, he opened David’s toy box and picked up some plastic cowboys and Indians, complete with ponies, that his little boy had loved to play with. The ache in his heart was boundless.
Aside from bringing the impersonal cruelty of illness home to him in a very personal way, David’s death had also taught him something about his fitness for a man-woman relationship, particularly one that might have to survive an emotional crisis. Or so he believed. As they’d dealt with the crushing blow of David’s cancer and death, he and Brenda had failed each other.
“What are you doing even thinking about Jessica Holmes?” he asked himself.
Three
Sterling and his twenty-two-year-old companion, the son of a trusted neighbor, arrived at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake shortly after 3:00 p.m. While the young man waited in Sterling’s Lincoln, the attorney knocked at the door of Jake’s motel unit and collected the keys to his Porsche. One glance was all it took to measure the Fortune CEO’s physical and mental state. Crusty, experienced courtroom warrior that he was, it tugged at his heartstrings to see Kate’s aristocratic-looking son so thoroughly leveled by the sordid situation in which he found himself.
Sympathy won’t do him any good, he thought. What he needs is a good strong dose of tough-mindedness.
Reemerging, he instructed his assistant to drive the sports car back to Minneapolis and park it in a guest spot beneath their apartment building. Handing over the keys, he gave the young man a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Put the keys in my mailbox,” he said. “If you’re stopped, you’re returning the Porsche to Minneapolis as a favor for a friend. That’s all you know. Call me on my mobile phone if the police give you any trouble.”
Chosen for his cool head and his lack of curiosity about other people’s business, the young man pocketed the money. “Will do, Mr. Foster,” he said with his typical nonchalance.
As he drove off, gunning the Porsche’s engine slightly, Sterling returned to Jake. “Okay,” he said, dusting off a somewhat grimy-looking chair and taking a seat, “let’s have it from the beginning. Tell me everything that happened last night. And I do mean everything.”
Still wretched and worse for wear, but with his wits more coherently gathered about him, Jake admitted going to Monica’s house and arguing with her over some stock he’d wanted to buy back from her.
“I was willing to pay a premium for it,” he said, bitterness permeating his voice. “She refused, using some of the foulest language I’ve ever heard. Suddenly, she came at me with a letter opener, and managed to stab me in the shoulder. When I struggled with her in self-defense, forcing her to drop it, she scratched at me with her fingernails. I didn’t actually push her until she picked it up and tried to stab me again.
“At that point…well, I did. I considered my life to be in danger. I guess I didn’t know my own strength, because she fell backward, hitting her head against that stupid marble fireplace of hers, the one with the naked dancing cupids. She was knocked out cold, but she came around pretty fast, and I helped her over to the sofa. Once she’d gotten her bearings, she started working up another head of steam. I was afraid she’d come at me again, and I’d had enough. I left and drove home…to Lake Travis.”
“Was anyone else in the house?”
Jake ran his fingers through his silver-brown hair. In that moment, the troubled edge he’d had for years showed very clearly. “Not that I know of,” he vowed.
“Was she expecting anyone?”
“If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”
A moment’s silence held as Sterling regarded him with a penetrating stare. If Monica had been blackmailing him, as Natalie’s account of their conversation seemed to suggest, he needed to know. He decided not to put the question directly. “Why’d you sell her the stock in the first place?” he asked.
Somehow, Jake had known the attorney would get around to posing that question. He wasn’t the first. Nate had grilled him about the stock, too, as had several of Fortune Industries’ directors. The fact that Monica had been amassing a sizable number of shares, with potentially serious ramifications for the company, hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone.
He couldn’t afford for the real reason to get out. “With my separation from Erica, and divorce looming as a possibility, I, uh, needed the money,” he prevaricated.
Sterling’s weathered-lion features contorted in disgust. “Cut the crap,” he ordered. “I want the truth.”
Usually so erect of posture, Jake seemed to sag against the mattress. “Whatever I tell you is confidential, right?” he asked after a moment. “Attorney-client privilege?”
The lawyer nodded.
“Okay, then. Several months ago, Monica informed me that I’m not Ben Fortune’s son. According to her, my real father was some poor stiff of a GI named Joe Stover, who got blown to pieces in World War II. She threatened to tell the world about my parentage if I didn’t cooperate.”
Sterling whistled. This was no clumsy attempt at dissembling on Jake’s part, but rather the unvarnished truth. His pain and sorrow were all too evident. The lawyer realized that, if Monica’s claim was true, the implications for Jake’s struggle with Nate over the company would be far-reaching. For one thing, they gave Jake an excellent motive for killing her.
“I take it you believed her,” he said.
Jake looked down at his hands. “Not completely,” he said. “At least, not at first. Dad’s name was on my birth certificate. Yet I’d always had my suspicions that I differed from my siblings in some way where he was concerned. I’m not saying he didn’t love me. Or even dote on me. But compared to the way he was with Nate, Lindsay and Rebecca, we were never really close.”
For years, Sterling had considered himself Kate’s closest confidant. Yet she’d never breathed a word of anything like this to him. “I assume the old tart offered you some sort of proof,” he said, a trifle angrily.
“She’d hired an investigator, rounded up a bunch of affidavits from people who knew Mom when she was just a teenage waitress. According to them, she was already pregnant by Stover when Dad appeared on the scene.”
“You saw the affidavits?”
Jake nodded. “They seemed genuine.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. Monica claimed that, after showing them to me, she’d put them in her safe-deposit box.”
The lawyer winced. In all likelihood, the affidavits—genuine or otherwise—would be found by the investigators probing Monica’s death. Her son, Brandon, a self-involved would-be actor and sometime errand boy for his mother, would become their proprietor. Even if he didn’t choose to bandy them about, they’d become part of the public record if Jake was tried as her murderer.
Somehow, Sterling had to keep that from happening. If it did, Kate would be wounded to the quick. And the family would be shaken to its foundations. Setting aside Jake’s bombshell for the moment, he concentrated on another aspect of the problem that was troubling him.
“From the way you describe events unfolding, your fingerprints must be all over Monica’s living room,” he said. “Your DNA, too, in the form of blood drops and fingernail scrapings. But…think carefully…did you touch the letter opener she stabbed you with? It’s likely to have been the murder weapon.”
His expression pained and his brown eyes focused on a point in midair, just past Sterling’s left shoulder, Jake tried to recall the details of the harrowing experience he’d had the night before. “I think so,” he said at last. “I must have, at some point, when I tried to wrest it from her grasp.”
Sterling stifled a groan. Jake was in hot water up to his eyebrows. True, there weren’t any eyewitnesses to testify that he’d done Monica in, because the simple fact was that he hadn’t. But there was more than enough damning physical evidence against him. If the police and the district attorney’s office settled on him, and suspended their efforts to find the real killer, he might end up being convicted of Monica’s murder.
He was going to need a crackerjack criminal attorney—preferably a team of them. As a lifelong practitioner of family and corporate law, Sterling wasn’t qualified to manage his defense. But he’d do his utmost to help. Frowning, he weighed the pros and cons of getting someone else involved at once, and decided against it. Jake would appear at police headquarters as a pillar of the community who had been victimized by Monica and had left her recovering from her excesses—an innocent man willing to tell the authorities all he knew, who had brought his family attorney with him for moral support.
It was time to call the police. Before picking up the phone, Sterling set some parameters for Jake. The Fortune executive was to repeat his story to the authorities exactly as he’d told it to him, without embellishment.
“The blackmail, too?” Jake asked reluctantly. “If it gets out that I’m not Ben’s son, Nate will sue to have me disinherited.”
Sterling was torn over that issue. There was always the hope that the whole ugly story would remain hidden until the real murderer was found. But that possibility was exceedingly slim. Besides, it must be clear from the physical evidence that Monica and Jake had struggled. For that, there had to be a reason. If Jake didn’t offer one, his story wouldn’t hold together.
The attorney wished mightily that he could consult with Jake’s yet-to-be-chosen defense attorney on that crucial issue. But it wasn’t to be. With characteristic firmness, he came to a decision. “You’ll have to tell them about it,” he said. “Your story won’t make sense if you don’t. And it’ll come out anyway. When it does, you’ll be seen as withholding evidence. As for Nate, there’s no way he can pull such a stunt. You’re Kate’s son, whoever your father was. And it was from Kate, not Ben, that you inherited.”
Instead of contacting Detective Rosczak, and working from the bottom up, Sterling went straight to the top. Nels Petersen, the Minneapolis police commissioner, happened to be a personal friend. “I understand your boys want to talk with a client of mine, Jake Fortune, the CEO of Fortune Industries, in connection with the death of Monica Malone,” he said forthrightly when Commissioner Petersen came on the line. “Mr. Fortune admits he visited Miss Malone yesterday evening. Though he had nothing whatever to do with her demise, he realizes the details of his exchange with her might prove helpful…”
Jake fretted visibly as Sterling listened to the police commissioner’s reply. The lawyer didn’t bother to enlighten him. “He’s out of town just now, but he’ll be back by dinnertime,” he said at last. “All right if we meet with you and the detectives who are handling the case at the Government Center around 7:30 p.m.? You’ll be there personally, I trust?”
It was a big favor to ask on a Saturday evening, when Commissioner Petersen doubtless had other plans. Yet the man agreed. Now, thought Sterling, all I have to do is drive Jake back to Minneapolis, see to it that he gets a shower, a shave and a hot meal, and help him firm up his story. At times, he reflected, lawyering was a lot like baby-sitting.
Jake’s encounter with the police that evening at the Hennepin County Government Center went as well as could be expected. With Sterling and Commissioner Petersen present, Detective Rosczak and his partner, Detective Harbing, didn’t try any tricky stuff. Yet they were hard-edged, skeptical, persistent. To Jake it felt as if they went over every point of his story a hundred times. Though both detectives seemed surprised, even taken aback, by his admission that Monica Malone had been blackmailing him, neither of them appeared to believe his version of what had taken place.
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Suzanne Carey
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Стоимость: 152.25 ₽
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Jessica Holmes had come to Minneapolis looking for a miracle. Her sweet little girl′s life was in jeopardy, and only a blood relative could help–only a Fortune.Amid all the skeptics who said she was after the Fortunes′ money, just one man believed Jessica′s story. Dr. Stephen Hunter vowed he would fight to save her precious daughter. But he hadn′t counted on fighting his own feelings for this remarkable woman, whose beauty and spirit tempted his hardened heart….