You Don't Own Me Page 18

  Kendra searched Laurie’s eyes for some clue of how she was going to handle the information that had just been dropped on her.

  “Didn’t it ever dawn on you that this man—this blackmailer—might have been the one to kill Martin?”

  “At first, yes. And I was going to go to the police—even if it meant that I’d be arrested, too. But he told me that he made the recordings with a plan to sell them to Martin. I guess in my haze I had told him that Martin wanted to leave me and take the kids, so he figured Martin would pay good money to make that happen. But then Martin’s death ruined his plan, and now I’m the one who has to pay.”

  “And you believed him?” Laurie asked.

  “Yes, absolutely.” Her voice was strong and confident, but how many times had Kendra wondered? She had temporarily become a different, darker, more desperate person, steered by a foggy, drug-addled haze. After all, she couldn’t even remember the conversations that the man recorded at the Beehive, and living with Martin had driven her to the brink of insanity. Was it possible she had planted the seed in this dangerous stranger’s head? Might she have even paid him to pull the trigger? Even now, she couldn’t swear to having clean hands.

  Laurie was staring off into the distance, as if she were struggling to weave together various threads of information. “It’s possible that he’s been following me, too,” Laurie said. “Someone even stole my case notes on Monday night.”

  Kendra shook her head. “I mean, I guess it’s possible. He’s always three steps ahead of me, but he didn’t say anything about it tonight. He was, however, very curious about what you knew and has been insistent that I keep him in the loop.”

  “You really have no idea who this man actually is?” Laurie asked.

  This time, Kendra could tell the unvarnished truth. “Not at all. He calls me from blocked numbers and always meets me on foot, so I don’t even have a license plate to track down. All I have is a burner number and this.”

  She pulled her cell phone from the back pocket of her jeans and scrolled to a photograph that she had looked at too many times. It was slightly blurry, and she hadn’t been able to use a flash, but she’d used the tricks on her phone to sharpen the edges and add some light. It wasn’t exactly magazine-ready, but anyone who knew this man should recognize him from this shot. “I pretended once to be checking my messages as I walked to one of our meet-ups. It’s blurry because I was shaking with fear that he’d catch me.”

  Laurie looked at the screen. It was a pretty good image under the circumstances. “Can you send that to me?” she asked.

  “I have your email address,” Kendra said as she uploaded the picture and hit send.

  “So now what?” Kendra asked.

  Laurie paused, looking around the garage as if she might spot the answer. “I don’t know.”

  “But you believe me?”

  Laurie opened her mouth to speak, but then stopped. “We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, be careful.”

  As Kendra watched Laurie walk west toward Sixth Avenue, she thought it was possible that someone might finally believe she was innocent—not of everything, but at least of Martin’s murder.

  52

  By the time Laurie had gotten home from Kendra’s the night before, she barely had enough time to eat takeout with Timmy and her father and then call Alex to say good night. Only a few months ago, she had hesitated to blend her life with his. Now she couldn’t wait for them to live together under one roof. She wanted him to be the last person she saw at night and the first person she saw in the morning.

  She was working at her desk the next day when her office phone rang. She could see the call was coming from Grace’s line and hit the speaker button.

  “What’s up?”

  “I hate to tell you this, but Dana just called. Brett Young’s on his way to see you. Oh—I see him now.” She hung up, and a few seconds later, Laurie heard a tap on her office door.

  “Come in,” she called out, trying not to allow her voice to reveal the dread she felt in her stomach. She wondered if Brett had seen the charges yet for her new computer and cell phone. She steeled herself for an argument about whether the replacements were a personal or company expense.

  She placed a fake smile on her face as she heard her office door open. She was shocked when Alex walked in. Grace was giggling at her desk behind him.

  When Laurie saw him at the door, she jumped up, ran over, and kissed him. His arms went tight around her. “What a wonderful surprise,” she said.

  “I was nearby and suddenly needed to see you. Ever since that man pushed you, I’ve been so worried. If anything had happened to you . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

  “Stop worrying, Your Honor. I really am okay.”

  They walked over to the conference table. When she sat in a chair, he began to gently massage her shoulders.

  “For someone who says she’s okay, you feel really tense,” he said as he massaged more deeply.

  “Don’t worry. I promise I’m all right.”

  She rolled her neck as the soothing effect of the massage took hold. “It’s your last free day before the chief judge starts assigning you cases. Are you doing anything special?”

  “Yes, I’m visiting you. By the way, it’s my last ‘weekday’ before cases,” he corrected. “My docket assignments begin Monday, and it’s only Friday.”

  “Well, I know tomorrow you’re taking your clerks to the Yankees game.”

  As a federal judge, Alex would employ two recent law school graduates as judicial clerks. Until the fall, he’d be working with the clerks who had been hired by his predecessor, who had decided to retire on his eightieth birthday. Laurie had met both clerks briefly at the induction. Samantha was a Yale grad, and Harvey went to Stanford. They both seemed bright, enthusiastic, and pleasantly surprised to be working for a boss who offered them first-level Yankees seats as a way to kick off their work together. “Get used to them calling you Your Honor.”

  She could tell he liked the sound of it.

  “Are you really holding up okay?” he asked. “I know you were torn last night about how to handle this new information about Kendra. It took every bit of restraint for me not to call the police when you told me. That has to be the same man who attacked you.”

  “Maybe,” she said, turning more toward him. “But we don’t even know who he is, so what’s the point? This man is obviously critical to the case, but I have no way of identifying him on my own. I could air his photograph and ask for tips, but then he’ll know Kendra told me about him, and she swears that he’s been threatening both her and her children. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

  “Of course not,” Alex agreed. “But you could go to the police with it. That’s probably the safest route.”

  As much as Ryan had turned a corner in his working relationship with her, she missed having Alex as a sounding board for her cases. When they brainstormed together, she always felt better afterward.

  “Part of me wants to do that, but what am I supposed to tell them? I don’t know who he is, or what he’s even done. Kendra says it never dawned on her that the man might be Martin’s killer, but that seems hard to believe. On the other hand, I can’t prove she hired him, either. I also have no idea if he’s the same man who attacked me on Monday. No matter how I game it out, I keep hitting a wall. Something doesn’t feel right. I’m missing the bigger picture, I just know it.”

  The impromptu massage Alex was delivering suddenly stopped. “Please tell me you aren’t working with Joe Brenner. Did that slimeball manage to weasel his way into the studio? Was it Brett Young who hired him? I could see him falling for something like that.”

  She swiveled her chair to face him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Him,” he said, reaching for a photograph on the conference table and pulling it closer. “Joe Brenner. He’s totally low-rent. Did he convince Brett to take him on as an investigator? If so, you must get rid of him. I’ll talk to Brett myse
lf if I have to.”

  It was a printout of the photograph that Kendra had emailed her from her cell phone the previous night. Beehive Man. “Alex, you know this guy? This is the guy from last night—the one Kendra claims is blackmailing her.”

  Alex leaned forward to get a closer look. “That’s definitely him.” He reached for her new laptop, typed a few keystrokes, and then turned the screen to face her. She saw a photo of the same man, but in a black open-collar shirt and black sports coat. He was losing his hair, and had shaved it close to the skin. His eyes were narrow and cold. “Mean,” as the bartender at the Beehive had described them.

  The text next to the head shot read “Joe Brenner is the owner of New York Capital Investigations, a private investigative firm with a quarter century experience conducting discreet and effective investigations.”

  Laurie’s thoughts were reeling. Why would a private eye shake down Kendra for money? Or did he? For all she knew, Kendra could have been lying. Maybe Kendra had been paying Brenner for stealing Laurie’s case notes and laptop.

  “How do you know him?” Laurie asked.

  “I don’t, not anymore. But about fifteen years ago, I was working on a multi-defendant conspiracy case. The attorney for one of the codefendants hired Brenner as an investigator. When he took the stand, I was absolutely convinced that he exaggerated the exculpatory evidence he claimed to have located. At one point, I thought he had even perjured himself. I couldn’t prove it, and the defendants were all convicted regardless. But I confronted the attorney who had hired him. He said sometimes clients were—quote—willing to pay extra for an investigator who goes the distance.”

  “So you think he lied on the stand for an extra fee,” Laurie said.

  Thoughts were pinging inside Laurie’s head so quickly, she was having a hard time keeping track of them. A stranger who started talking to Kendra at a dive bar just happened to be a lowlife private eye who recorded her conversations? That was too much of a coincidence. She thought about Martin Bell’s desire to leave Kendra and retain custody of his children. Maybe he had hired Brenner to chat up his wife and gather incriminating evidence. But if the plan had worked and Brenner had damning recordings of an impaired Kendra, why hadn’t Martin filed for divorce? And wouldn’t he have told his parents about his intentions?

  Or maybe the alleged recordings didn’t even exist. Kendra could have fabricated the entire story to cover the fact that she had paid Brenner to kill her husband.

  Laurie could tell she was close to connecting the dots, but each time she was about to have a breakthrough, she felt the truth fall from her grasp.

  Alex was staring at Brenner’s photograph, clearly upset that this man had entered Laurie’s orbit. “As I said, I can’t prove it. But I was certain enough that I spread the word among defense lawyers that they should avoid him, and apparently I wasn’t the only one. His work for litigators has completely dried up. No one will touch him because they think it could backfire at trial.”

  Stretching the truth under oath was one thing; murder for hire was another. Maybe Brenner’s detective business had disintegrated to the point that he had crossed the line to working as a paid killer.

  “Yet he still has a private eye website,” she said, gesturing toward his image on her screen. His face—those dark, mean eyes—gave her a chill. “Apparently someone is still hiring him?”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Alex said drily. “People think lawyers have no scruples? If Brenner’s bankroll is any lesson, then politicians are even worse.”

  “He has political clients?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. You see, lawyers need to worry about him getting caught on the stand playing loose with the facts. But if you just need a tough guy willing to cut corners to dig up dirt on your political enemies? Brenner’s the go-to man in certain circles. My guess is the guy’s a regular on the Amtrak back and forth to Albany.”

  And with one little word, Laurie finally had a breakthrough. Albany.

  She reached for her cell phone on the table and pulled up her father’s number.

  “You figured it out, didn’t you?” Alex asked.

  “Almost.” When her father answered, she spelled out her theory as Alex nodded along beside her. When she was done, she asked Leo if he could make another call to his NYPD source.

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  53

  Three hours later, Laurie was alone with Daniel Longfellow in his Upper West Side apartment. After he explained that Leigh Ann was still at work and the dogs were at doggie daycare, she made quick work of thanking him for finding time to meet with her.

  “To be honest, Laurie, you didn’t give me much of a choice. I think you know how much my wife and I would like to keep our names out of your production. I assumed by now you had confirmed our lack of involvement.”

  Opting for a blunt introduction, she dropped a photograph of Joe Brenner on the living room coffee table. “I think you know this man,” she said.

  His face immediately validated her instincts. A less decent man could have hidden his link to whatever was going on between Joe Brenner and Kendra Bell. But Daniel Longfellow wasn’t a talented liar. She would be able to extract the truth from him.

  “Where did you get that picture?” he asked.

  “He’s not exactly in hiding,” she said. “He’s basically the center of our investigation. And we know you have a connection to him.”

  She allowed the silence to permeate the room. She could tell from the way he bit his lower lip that her instincts had been right. Longfellow knew Joe Brenner, and their relationship had something to do with Martin Bell’s death.

  Laurie decided to take a stab in the dark. “All these years, Kendra thought she had the worst luck in the world. She vented about her unhappy marriage to a random stranger, and, lo and behold, the man recorded her and then blackmailed her when her husband just happened to be murdered. She never connected the dots. She never even entertained the possibility that this man might be the killer until I suggested it.”

  Longfellow was struggling to maintain the aloofness of a man with a healthy distance from the subject at hand. “Ms. Moran, I’m a supporter of the work you do for your television program, but I’m afraid I need to call this a day.”

  “Please,” she said, “hear me out, or else I’ll have this conversation with my television audience. What are the odds that Kendra Bell happened to pour her heart out to a man who would use that information to blackmail her for years? Or even worse, maybe he even killed her husband in cold blood as just the first step in a blackmail scheme.”

  Laurie paused to search out Longfellow’s expression. Any stranger who had nothing to do with the man in the photograph would have been completely perplexed. Longfellow did not strike her as a man out of step with the conversation.

  “This man,” she said. “He’s a private investigator. Joe Brenner. Brenner was never a random stranger at Kendra’s bar, was he?”

  Daniel covered his mouth, as if he were suddenly imagining a series of horrible events he had never envisioned before.

  “I’m fundamentally a good man,” he said, his gaze moving behind her in the distance.

  “Then this is your chance to prove it,” Laurie said. “Whatever mistakes you made were years ago. I need you to tell me what you know about Joe Brenner.”

  Senator Longfellow swallowed, and Laurie could tell that he was weighing the consequences of the decision he was about to make. “Brenner’s a well-known quantity in Albany,” he muttered. “I hired him—almost six years ago. Somewhere along the way, Leigh Ann and I became almost a long-distance relationship, even though we never planned it that way. I wanted to believe that we were both doing the work that was important to us, but, at some point, I could tell that something was broken. I suspected she was seeing another man.”

  Laurie sensed that Longfellow was ready to open up to her. “So you hired a private investigator to confirm your suspicions,” she said.
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  It made perfect sense. Kendra had not been the only spouse to worry about the amount of time Martin and Leigh Ann were spending together. Brenner may have been disreputable among New York City lawyers, but he was also willing to use questionable tactics to unearth dirty secrets when necessary. That was the kind of person Longfellow had turned to in a moment of jealousy.

  He swallowed before answering. “That’s not how I thought of it. At least, not at first. I told myself he would disprove my theory. He’d check on Leigh Ann in the city and tell me it was all in my imagination. It was a gamble, but it would have felt so great to have a shark of a private investigator come back and tell me I had nothing to worry about.”

  “But that’s not what happened,” Laurie said.

  “There’s that saying: Be careful what you wish for. I had heard such questionable things about Brenner’s tactics, but I became consumed with knowing the truth. And then”—he shook his head—“I got what I’d wished for.”

  “He obtained proof that Leigh Ann was more than friends with Martin Bell,” Laurie said. She thought about George Naughten’s memory of Martin Bell kissing a woman in a taxi. It was Leigh Ann Longfellow, exactly as Kendra Bell had suspected all along.

  Daniel wiped his face with his hands. “His work confirmed my worst suspicions. He even had photographs. I was paralyzed with indecision.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave her?” Laurie asked.

  “Because I didn’t want to!” He made the answer seem so obvious. It was true love, exactly as she had sensed when she first met them. “Why would I leave Leigh Ann? I’d known she was my perfect partner and my one true love since we first met at Columbia.”

  Daniel’s gaze shifted to the floor as he ran nervous fingers through his full head of hair.

  He pressed his eyes closed and shook his head. “At that moment, if I could have taken it all back, I would have. Because I knew that if I confronted her with the evidence I had collected, it would have broken us forever.”