Нора Робертс - Hideaway

“If love isn’t stronger than pride, it isn’t love.”

“That’s … that’s completely true. And I’ve seen that truth, firsthand, all my life. Like Dad did, Darlie’s choosing her work differently. She said no to this series before because she wouldn’t leave her son for weeks and months on end, and wouldn’t take him away from his father for the same reason. Now she’s a single parent with a disinterested ex, so she took it. And partly because it removes Luke from the media chaos, the gossip, the speculations. I admire that.”

“So do I.”

“Dad did that for me, gave me Ireland. And after, you and G-Lil juggled me with him. One or more of you would always be there.”

“And now you’re here for me.”

“I sort of think we’re here for each other.”

Looking away from the sea, Cate scanned the vineyard, climbing up its tiered terraces, and the pretty little orchard where the April blossoms had fallen and the fruit began to form.

Season by season, she thought. Year by year.

“I never missed her, you know. I had such wonderful women stepping into the mother role for me. I hope Darlie finds some good men to do the same for Luke. She doesn’t have a family like ours.”

“Who does?”

Smiling, she toasted again. Then set down her glass when she saw Red walking toward them.

“Hi! Sit. I’ll run and get another glass.”

“I sure wouldn’t mind it.”

Consuela met her with one halfway across the bridge.

As she started back, she looked down, saw the two men in what read as heavy conversation.

Not a social call, she decided, though she’d expected just this.

She put on a casual smile as she walked down to pour Red a glass.

“Okay, now you can start over from the beginning. What do you think, feel, believe, suspect about Sparks, about all the rest?”

After fiddling with his Wayfarers, Red puffed out his cheeks. “I hate to pull you back into this, Cate.”

“I’ve never been all the way out of it.” Reaching over she rubbed her hand over Hugh’s. “Stop worrying about shielding me.”

“It’s always the first instinct, even when I know better.”

“Let’s think about it this way. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“I wish I had more facts,” Red told her. “More definites to give you. I can start with some of those. Sparks was stabbed in a communal area, just before the start of a scheduled movie viewing, so you’ve got a lot of inmates coming in, milling around some before they settled in. The shank missed vital areas.”

Demonstrating, Red tapped a fist to the left of the small of his back. “A couple inches over, it would’ve hit a kidney, and he’d be in more trouble. Sharpened toothbrush. He says he felt a sharp pain, reached back, got ahold of it, tried to pull it out. Went down.”

“It sounds painful, if not lethal.”

“Oh, he felt it. But a shank like that, you want to hit something important, and you want to hit more than once. If someone was trying to take him out, they did a sloppy, half-assed job of it.”

“Do you think it was more of a warning? Something not a part of any of the rest. Just some prison problem.”

Taking his time, Red drank some lemonade. “That’s a theory.”

She caught the tone, angled her head. “Not yours.”

“He’s got almost twenty years inside, never an incident. Mic and I go up and talk to him a few weeks ago, let him know we’re looking at him. He gets shanked, sloppy and half-assed.

“Denby gets shanked, multiple stab wounds, gut wounds, heart wounds—nothing sloppy about it. Scarpetti’s attacked, held underwater until he drowns. Clean, quick, done. The two who came after me? Bad luck for them I know the road better than they did, bad luck they boosted a car the driver couldn’t handle. But they sure as hell killed my truck, and they sure as hell planned it out.”

She spread her hands. “Leaving us with this being sloppy and half-assed. So different than the others.”

“Could be whoever’s behind this chose poorly this time out.”

Reasonable, Cate thought, nodding. “But that’s not your theory either.”

“I’m thinking it through, running it through with Dillon after I got word on it. The morning after it happened. We’re out there moving cattle from pasture to pasture. I’m saying it doesn’t add up for me, doesn’t smell right. And he says what I’m thinking.”

Red leaned forward. “What if the son of a bitch did it to himself?”

“Stabbed himself?” The air went out of her at the idea. “But that’s crazy, isn’t it? You said he barely missed his kidney.”

“But he did miss it, didn’t he? The man knows his body. He’s spent most of his life working on it.”

“Sloppy’s one thing. Jabbing a sharpened toothbrush into your own body, that’s another. He could’ve miscalculated, or gotten jostled at the key moment.”

“He didn’t. He wasn’t.”

“Still an enormous risk,” Hugh put in. “For what possible gain?”

“How I figure he figures? It takes him off the suspect list. ‘Look at me, I was attacked, too.’ The man’s a liar, one who’s run his life on lies and cons.”

Face set, Red tapped a fist on the table. “I tell you as sure as I’m sitting here he lied to me and Mic when we talked to him. A load of horseshit about just wanting to do his time, how he deserved what he got. He made sure to shift some of the blame to Denby and Dupont, but claimed he’d put it behind him.”

Red took another drink. “Horseshit.”

“You really believe this? Dillon believes this?”

Red nodded. “It’s what adds up for me. It smells right to me. Mic, well, she’s about halfway there on it. The other half doesn’t see him as having the spine to do it, to hurt himself.”

“He’s still in prison,” Cate pointed out. “How could he do all this from prison?”

“Start with Denby. Nobody liked the bastard. He got his ass kicked regularly, did time in solitary. I’m betting you could barter his murder for a couple packs of smokes. With nearly two decades in, you can be sure a man like Sparks made connections, made friends, knows who’ll do what and what they want to do it. Grifters, they’re going to grift inside or out.”

Hugh looked over the pool to the deeper, bolder water of the Pacific. “The others wouldn’t be that easy.”

“Connections. An ex-con doing a job, taking a quick score for it. There are ways to make money in prison, to get it in, get it out. Sparks would find ways. The two that came for me did time. Not in San Quentin, but you put the word out, order the hit.”

Tapping that fist, Red scowled out to sea. “We’d have gotten it out of them if they’d lived. Sparks got lucky there.”

“This isn’t just a theory for you,” Cate realized.

“It’s a theory until I can prove it.” Red reached into the bowl of berries, eating absently. “His lawyer? He hired this one over a year ago. She’s a writer, too, one with a bad-guy fetish.”

“I’m not sure I want to know what that means, exactly.”

Red gave Cate a half smile. “A lot of women get hung up on men in prison. Write them, visit them, hell, even marry them. This one writes about them. She’s got a couple of true crime books under her belt. I read one of them, and maybe it’s just the cop in me, but my take? She leans toward the side of the criminal. She got clearance to interview Denby and Sparks for a book she’s going to write, or is writing.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jessica Rowe,” he told Hugh.

“That’s familiar. Give me a minute.” He rose, took out his phone, walked to the other end of the pool.

“I’m not playing devil’s advocate, but it seems logical a criminal would want a lawyer who sympathizes with criminals.”