Leaning back against his chair, Bill folded his hands over his well-toned stomach. “Look, Jared, old friend, this case has us baffled. We don’t want to haul her in here and scare her into telling us whatever she knows. If she knows anything, that is. And, as you said, maybe this was personal. This woman lived in New York for a while, so maybe she met this guy”—he glanced at the paper—“Roger Applegate—good American name, huh?—in New York. Maybe he met her, liked her, maybe they fell in love. Maybe he was planning to retire and marry her. Maybe when he knew that he’d been found out, his only thought was of protecting her name. He didn’t seem to care if we investigated the criminals whose names were on the disks, but maybe he did care that we didn’t involve the love of his life in something sordid. On the other hand, maybe this Ms. Palmer had no idea this man had a crush on her. He was a mousy-looking little thing who nobody noticed, so maybe Ms. Palmer was the secret object of his affection and she never knew about his great love for her.”
“Or maybe she knows everything,” Jared said tiredly. “And maybe you want me to find out one way or the other.”
“You always were heavy in the brains department,” Bill said, smiling.
Jared gave a sigh. In all his years in the agency, he’d tried hard to never get personally involved with the people connected to his investigations. Emotions kept you from seeing things clearly. But now, if he was understanding this, he was being asked to get to know this woman in a personal way and find out what she knew. She wasn’t some underworld figure, wasn’t a reformed anything. She was a—He looked at Bill. “She go to church?”
“Every Sunday.”
Jared groaned. “But she did have a child out of wedlock.” There was hope in his voice.
“She was seventeen and walking home from choir practice when a man leaped on her. Her parents kicked her out when she came up pregnant.”
Jared looked like he was going to cry. “Lord! A persecuted heroine. Tragic happenings to an innocent,” Jared said, his mouth a tight line. “Deliver me!” He glared at Bill, but Bill just grinned. Jared knew that he’d been chosen because of his age and his looks. He had dark hair, dark blue eyes, and a body kept trim by years spent in a gym. If he drank gallons of beer and ate lots of doughnuts, could he get fat in about four days? “So who left her the house?”
Bill leafed through the papers in the folder. “Alice Augusta Farrington. Born rich, but her druggie son spent everything. At least he had the courtesy to die before his mother did, so she had a few years of peace. She left the house and what was left of her fortune to our Ms. Palmer.”
“How did our perfect heroine meet the rich old broad?”
“Seems the old gal took her in when Ms. Palmer was just a kid and pregnant. She, the old one that is, wanted someone to sort out all the papers in her attic. The house was built in”—he glanced down—“about 1720 by one of the ancestors of the old woman’s. Ms. Palmer spent years cataloging the family papers.”
“Another virtue and another talent,” Jared said with a grimace. “Truly an angel. Let me guess, Ms. Palmer and her kid stayed for years, beloved by all.”
“She stayed until her daughter was five years old, then left in the middle of the night.” Bill looked at Jared hard. “The old woman’s son was a registered sex offender. Little kids. Girls, boys, he didn’t care which. We have no way of knowing, but we figure he went after Ms. Palmer’s daughter, and she left her comfortable home in a hurry.”
Jared looked away for a moment. He really hated people who hurt children. He looked back at Bill. “Okay, so she’s not had an easy life. A lot of us haven’t. But it sounds to me as though she’s been enough places and seen enough that she could have met this guy Applegate. Maybe if you just ask her what she knows she’d tell you. Maybe—”
“Remember Tess Brewster?”
“Sure,” Jared said, his jaw muscle working. “But what do you mean, remember?”
“About a month ago, we started making some discreet inquiries about Ms. Palmer. New York turned up nothing. Neither did the town where she was born. But we moved Tess into Arundel, that’s where the old house is. We rented a place for Tess down the road from the one Ms. Palmer has inherited. Well, last week Tess was killed in a hit-and-run. We investigated as quietly as we could; it looks like it was a professional job.”
Jared sighed. He’d liked Tess. She could drink any man under the table, and she’d been a good agent. “Do you think it’s the house or the angelic Ms. Palmer?”
“We don’t know, but we’re sure something’s there. One of the two is being watched very closely, and that’s one reason we need you.”
“I see. I have managed to keep my mug out of the paper.”
“Yeah, for the most part, you’ve been hidden from public view. Tess—”
“Was easily recognized. Her face was all over the papers for about six weeks when she testified against that mobster.” Jared’s head came up. “Maybe he—”
“Maybe that hoodlum she testified against killed her? He died two years ago, and we don’t think he was powerful enough or beloved enough that anyone would risk killing a federal agent on his behalf. And why wait seven years? No, we think someone recognized Tess for what she was and she was killed so she wouldn’t find out what Ms. Palmer knows—or what’s in that house.”
Jared felt that Bill knew more than he was telling, and he doubted if anyone really thought the woman was innocent. “Do you have any idea what this Palmer woman knows? Is it someone’s name? Or is it information? Or is it something that she has? Maybe she knows what’s buried in the backyard.”
Bill lifted a file box from the floor onto his desk. “This is full of info about her. Everything we could find. Tess made two reports before she was murdered but found out nothing. I’ll tell you what, you take that box home, read it over the weekend, then tell me what you think on Monday. If you agree to do it, fine. If you don’t, then that’s fine too.”
Jared had worked with Bill for too many years to fall for that. If he knew Bill—and he did—a new identity was already waiting for him. Jared reached for the file box. “What’s my cover?” he asked.
Bill tried to keep from smiling but failed. “We rented the house next door to her. It’s just a fishing cabin that used to belong to the old woman, but she had to sell it to pay her son’s debts. Between drugs and lawyers, he cost her millions. You’re to be a retired policeman, out early on account of your knee, your wife of twenty-six years has just died, and you’ve rented this house in the middle of nowhere so you can go fishing and hunting and forget all your troubles. You need something to cry on her shoulder about. Women like that.”
Jared bit his tongue to keep quiet. Bill had been married to the same woman for thirty-five years and liked to think that he knew all about women and marriage. The truth was that his wife spent nearly half the ye
ar in another state living with her never-married sister, who was rumored to be a real hellion. There was a lot of laughing speculation as to what Bill’s wife got up to when she was with her sister.
“If this woman hasn’t been told yet that she’s inherited this house, how do you know that she won’t sell it sight unseen? What makes you so sure she’ll move away from the city lights to go to the wilds of rural North Carolina?”