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“True enough. But someday this is going to be over, one way or the other. What are you going to do then, Jade? Run the agency by yourself?”
She shook her head. She’d wondered when he’d get around to asking this particular question.
“No, that’s not possible. Teddy was the heart and soul. I was just the nuts-and-bolts person, working the computer and hardly ever going out into the field. I don’t have… I don’t have his flair. The Sunshine Detective Agency is officially out of business.”
“Leaving you free to go out West and be a cowgirl or fly to the moon. Which will it be, Jade?”
Did he have any idea how much he was hurting her? Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them away as she cleared the counter. “Neither. I suppose I’ll have to find a new dream.”
“Or tell me the real one,” Court said, finishing his sandwich. “I’m guessing ‘chef isn’t on the top of your list.”
Jade smiled at his attempt to lighten the moment. Obviously he did know he was hurting her. Yet he kept on pushing. Maybe if they’d talked more before they’d married, they wouldn’t have fallen apart at the first obstacle. Maybe…
“You’re not going to stop, are you? You’re going to push at me and push at me until I tell you what you think you want to know.”
“That’s the general plan, sweetheart, yes,” he said, following her back into the living room. “Is it working?”
She stopped and turned to face him, surprised that he had been walking so closely behind her. “A doctor. I thought I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, all right?”
Court just looked at her, his expression unreadable. “What kind?”
Jade sighed. “What do you mean, what kind? A doctor doctor. Okay, so I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she said quietly. “From the Christmas I was six and got a play medical kit and practiced on all our dolls. And on Jessica and Jolie, whenever they’d let me. It’s all I’d ever wanted. And then our mother took a hike and I had to have other priorities. Now I’m edging into my thirties and too old to think about years of medical school, specializing, going through an internship and residency. A dream, that’s all it was back then, and I’ve put it away. Happy now?”
“No, I can’t say that I am,” Court told her as he reached out a hand and gently stroked her cheek. “A pediatrician. Because you love medicine and you love kids. Ah, baby, it still hurts, doesn’t it? All these years later, and it still hurts.”
She longed to melt against him, feel his arms tight around her, his strength supporting her as she let go of some of her grief. For Teddy. For everything she’d lost. “I told you, Court, medical school was only a childish dream. I’m too practical to live in dreams. I needed… I wanted to help Teddy.”
“Because he needed you. Because he relied on you. And you let him steal your dream.”
“No, that’s not true!” Jade bristled, probably because she’d sometimes thought the same thing. “My mother was gone. She didn’t care enough about me…about us all, I mean, to stick around. So maybe I needed him, too. Maybe I needed to feel indispensable to someone. Did you ever think of that? Don’t dissect me, Court. I know I’m not perfect, I know I’ve got what shrinks call baggage. But it’s my baggage and I can live with it. And we made it work, Court. Look at Jolie, look at Jessica. Look at their successes. We made it work.”
“Not to belittle your achievement with your sisters, Jade, but to hell with Jess and Jolie. I’m looking at you, I’m looking at us. But there is no us. I never really fit in there anywhere, did I? Yet there I was, at least for a little while. Jess and Jolie grown and gone, and you still here, still mothering the bright, personable, but always needy Teddy. What was I for you, Jade? Your one stab at rebellion, at adventure—at independence?”
“You’re wrong. It wasn’t like that between us. It couldn’t have been like that, damn it.” Her eyes shifted involuntarily to the left—according to
Jessica, a sure sign someone is at least searching for an alternative truth—so she quickly looked at Court again. “Don’t cheapen what we had, please, or try some psychobabble explanation to explain it. I loved you.”
“I hope so, Jade. I really hope so. I hope that, somewhere inside, you still do.” He leaned in and kissed her. On the cheek. Like they were friends, pals. Former lovers, one-time mates. “Come on, let’s do what you really want to do. Let’s get back to work.”
Jade nodded, unable to say anything, and Court took her hand and led her back to the couch, back to the stack of files on the coffee table.
He picked up the Vanishing Bride file and tossed it to the floor. “One down. What’s next?”
“The Fishtown Strangler,” Jade said, willing her mind back on the cases. The cases, and solving them, clearing Teddy’s name, that’s all that was important now. Later, when the nightmare was over, when she’d fixed things—yes, fixed things, the way she always did—only then could she think about what Court had said to her. “This is where it all gets tricky, doesn’t it? Jess and Matt found the killer, but he denies that Tarin White was one of his victims.”
“The man’s a terminal AIDS patient in Grater- ford Prison. His confession to Matt and Jess could almost be called a dying declaration. There’s no reason not to believe him. And no real reason for him to lie, come to think of it.”
“I know,” Jade said, looking at the photograph of Tarin White. “Yet the MO, on the surface, is so similar, right down the line. Raped, strangled, dumped in Fishtown. The same brand of plastic wash-line cord used to bind her wrists and ankles, everything. Allegedly a prostitute, just like the other victims, and smack inside the time frame when the Fishtown Strangler was active. So what makes her different?”
“Which of Jess’s many theories do you want to run with?” Court asked her, picking up a legal pad with Jessica’s neat notes written on the top sheet, the main points highlighted in pink. “Crazy as it sounds, I pretty much favor the one where Tarin White dovetails somewhat into the Baby in the Dumpster case.”
“I know, me, too. Tarin as the dead baby’s mother,” Jade said, nodding. “Farfetched, but possible, especially since the infant’s body had been frozen, making time of death impossible to determine. Nobody ever claimed the child, no one reported a child that age missing. With Tarin dead, who could?” She reached for the Baby in the Dumpster file. “Give me the date of Tarin’s murder again.”
After a few moments Court told her the date on the medical examiner’s report. “Does that work?”
“It’s the same year, the same summer. About three months give or take between the day of Tarin’s death and the discovery of the baby’s body. But anything else is conjecture, just another of Jessica’s theories. Let’s review what we actually know, okay?”
Court ripped off the page of Jessica’s notes and picked up a pen, ready to start a new list. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“In a second,” Jade said, shuffling notes and papers. “So much is fact and so much is conjecture. It’s becoming difficult to sort them out in my head. Okay, let’s start just with Tarin.”
“Prostitute.”
“We don’t even know that for sure, do we?” Jade asked, looking at the photograph again. Tarin White had the face of an angel, her dark eyes and dusky complexion surrounded by a halo of soft black curls. “Her former landlord disputes that and told Jessica and Matt that Tarin had a boyfriend. As in singular. Write her name, write prostitute on the first line beneath her name, but put a question mark behind it.”
“You want strict outline form, Roman numerals, that sort of thing, Ms. Sunshine, or do I just wing it?”
Jade finally smiled. “I’m giving orders, aren’t I? I’m supposedly very good at that, being bossy, Jolie says, although I’ve never really noticed. Sorry.”
“All right. And I’ll be sorry that I’m not very good at taking orders and do what you want, even as I add a second line—mother of dead baby, question mark.”
“That’s out of order,” Jade said, and then bit her lip. “No, no, that’s good. Now let’s go back to more on Tarin as Tarin, not as prostitute or as anybody’s mother. We know from her autopsy report that she had extensive dental implants, high-quality work.”
“Unusual for a street prostitute, correct,” Court said as he wrote on the pad. “And thanks again to Jessica and Matt and to one intimidated dentist Teddy found just before he died, we now know that Joshua Brainard, mayoral candidate and husband of the late Melodie Brainard—who, it turns out, is your father’s supposed victim—paid for that extensive dental work.”
“Which still totally blows my mind,” Jade admitted as she turned over pages in the Fishtown
Strangler file. “The connection is definite, easily proved with the dentist’s records, and Brainard has to know that. You’d think he’d be running scared, not running for mayor. But now we get back into conjecture. Like, Tarin wasn’t a prostitute at all. Like, her boyfriend was the very wealthy, handsome Joshua Brainard, just out of grad school, married, and up-and-coming-man-about-town back then, Philadelphia’s fair-haired son now.”
Court consulted Jessica’s notes. “While talking about Joshua Brainard, we have to take into consideration that he and his father were present at the gravesite when Tarin was buried. Jessica and Matt got the tape from her studio archives and there they were, front and center. Them, and a few prostitutes. We think we might know why Joshua was there, but how do you explain the prostitutes?”
“A show of solidarity? They assumed Tarin was one of them, because all the previous Fishtown Strangler victims had been working girls?” Jade shrugged. “And the Brainards were there because Daddy Brainard was a member of the mayor’s commission pulled together to help solve the Fishtown Strangler case. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. And to be fair, the rest of the commission was also there.”
“But that doesn’t explain Joshua. He wasn’t on the commission.”
“He was lending his father moral support, or at least I’m sure that’s what he’d say if anyone asked. I don’t know why he was there, Court. Maybe because he was Tarin’s married lover. Maybe he paid for her dental work and fathered her child and then killed both of them because Tarin was suddenly more inconvenience than potential life partner. Maybe because he’d figured out that with his looks and Daddy’s money and position, he had a big future in politics. He didn’t need the baggage, Tarin didn’t want to go away quietly, so he chose a more permanent way of saying farewell to young love. That’s the conjecture part.”
“Mixed with the facts. Like the dental implants.”
Jade toed off her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her on the couch. “Here’s another fact. With Clifford Brainard as one of the commission members, sonny boy would have had access to anything his daddy brought home from the office. Like, for instance, how the other women died. Right down to the brand of rope used to tie up his former lover, beat her, rape her and then strangle her—and, by the way, strangling someone isn’t easy. It takes time, lots of up-close-and-personal time, so strangling someone is actually pretty rare, rare enough to brand a killer. Strangling someone you once loved, someone who bore you a child, takes a special sort of sadistic bastard, Court. Except…”
“Go on.”
“Matt told me something a few days ago,” Jade said, frowning. “And he took the medical examiner’s one-page summary out of Tarin’s file so Jessica wouldn’t see it and go ballistic, so don’t bother looking for it. According to the medical examiner, Tarin wasn’t raped and then killed. She was killed—strangled—and only then assaulted sexually with a foreign object. Like, you know, the other victims were raped, so Tarin had to appear to have been raped, as well, to keep with the MO. Which is why Matt and I weren’t as surprised as the rest of you when the Fishtown Strangler denied that Tarin was one of his victims.”
Court sat up straight. “What?”
Jade nodded. “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. The other victims were raped perimortem—we know that from their autopsy reports, just like we know from Tarin’s that she’d given birth not too long before she died. Maybe a couple of months,
Matt told me. Making it possible that she’s the mother of the Baby in the Dumpster.”
“You really think Joshua Brainard murdered Tarin White in a copycat killing?” Court frowned and then held up his index finger, as if asking her not to answer him yet as he was still working it all out in his mind. “If there was any physical evidence left behind by the rapist, that evidence couldn’t differ in Tarin’s case, correct? So he couldn’t rape her. He couldn’t take that chance. But she still had to appear as if she’d been… violated.”
“Exactly. And one other thing. Herman Long-street is a nonsecretor, meaning they can’t get a blood type just from bodily fluids. That was in the police files from the get-go. You can fake a lot of things, but you can’t fake that. So first Joshua kills her and then he sets the scene, simulates the rape. According to Matt, the police weren’t all that concerned with the victims back then, as the killings were still going on and all the victims were assumed to be prostitutes. If they’d found a suspect, if a case had gone to trial, then the discrepancy in Tarin’s autopsy would have immediately become apparent. But there never was an arrest.”
“You’re sold on this, aren’t you? That Joshua
Brainard murdered Tarin White and made it look like she was one of the Fishtown Strangler victims.”
“He killed Tarin and the baby. Don’t forget that poor baby. And yes, I do believe it. Because then the rest makes sense. Think about it, Court. Teddy was investigating all these cases for years, right? He’d pretty much solved the Vanishing Bride case before Jolie and Sam took it over. I love Jolie, I really do, and I’m proud of what she did, being a complete amateur detective, but she and Sam really fell into solving that case. Teddy even had the plane ticket so he could go see for himself if he was right.”
Court shook his head. “No. We’re back to the Vanishing Bride case? Sorry, I’m not getting where you’re headed on this.”
“I’ll explain. Why wouldn’t Teddy have gone flying off the moment he thought he’d figured it all out? I mean, after all the years of chipping away at these cold cases, he finally makes a breakthrough on one of them. He had to be over the moon with his success, so why wait to see if you’re right? Why make airline reservations a week or more out?”
“Because he thought he was also close on another case? Or even better, on two other cases that had suddenly rolled into one?” Court said, and Jade wanted to kiss him. He was so smart.
“Where was Teddy seen the night he was killed? At Joshua Brainard’s house, right? Teddy wouldn’t have gone there looking for Joshua, because Joshua had some speaking thing going on in Kensington, and Teddy would have checked that out easily enough. No, he went there at that time, at night, expressly to see Melodie Brainard without chancing that Joshua would also be there.”
“All right. That makes sense.”
“I know, scary sense. What did Brainard tell Jolie? That Teddy had been stalking Melodie for a couple of weeks, right? The card Matt found in one of Teddy’s shirt pockets, the one with the dentist’s name on it? Teddy had been to see that dentist around two weeks before he died. That made the connection for him. After all these years of schlepping himself from dentist to dentist throughout the greater Delaware Valley and parts of New Jersey, flashing that photograph of Tarin, hitting dead end after dead end, he finally struck pay dirt and landed on the guy he’d been looking for. He finally found out who had paid the freight for Tarin’s pretty smile.”
“Joshua Brainard.”
“Exactly. And suddenly, dotting the final i’s and crossing the final t’s on the Vanishing Bride case had to take a number and get in line, because this was big—huge. He tried to see Joshua at his campaign headquarters, but the great man was too busy with his race to be elected to see him, so Teddy went after the wife, Melodie. Teddy was on to something, Court, he was close. Close enough to call attention to himself. And Joshua Brainard has a lot to lose, doesn’t he?”
“Do you think Melodie told Teddy anything?”
Jade shook her head. “I don’t know. The better question might be—what did Teddy tell her? Let’s switch to what we learned from the girl who shampooed Melodie Brainard’s hair about ten days before the murder. She told us about the bruises on Melodie’s neck and cheek, the ones Melodie tried to cover with makeup, remember? And then that business about that same shampoo girl overhearing Melodie telling her hairdresser she wasn’t going to take it anymore, who did he think he was…whatever that was all about. So, yes, Teddy might have told her something, and maybe she repeated what he’d said to Brainard, who went ballistic on her.”
“All of this taking place about two weeks before they were both dead. Teddy kept going back to see Melodie, didn’t he? Including that last night. He had some information or some plan we still don’t know about, didn’t he?”
“But I think we do know about it, Court,” Jade said, her heart pounding so hard she was surprised he didn’t hear it, and comment on it. She still couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed anything different in Teddy’s behavior, or that he hadn’t chosen to confide in her. When adding up her list of hurts, those two things pretty much topped the list. “I think I suddenly understand why Teddy kept going back to Melodie Brainard, kept working on her, and why he needed her.”
Court laid down the pen. He’d stopped taking notes long ago. “Feel up to sharing?”
Jade pressed a hand to her chest. “I’m sorry. I feel like Jessica, jumping to conclusions—and thank God Matt has put so many stars in her eyes that she hasn’t seen this yet for herself, not that she won’t soon, which is why I’m actually glad she’s gone right now. But I think I know better how Teddy operated, having worked with him. I think I know what he was after. If he had connected the cases, that is. I mean, the idea that the baby’s body was frozen for all those months? What other reason than to disguise the time of death, make it unlikely that Tarin’s death would be in any way connected to the baby’s death, correct?”
“Is this all coming to a head anytime soon? Like Jolie and Sam and Jess, I also don’t have my PI license, remember?”
Jade closed her eyes for a second and then looked at Court. “I’m betting Teddy was after Brainard’s DNA. The man’s staff wouldn’t let Teddy near him, so what better way to get it than to ask the little wife’s help?”
“Why would Melodie Brainard want to help Teddy?”
Jade shrugged. “It wasn’t a happy marriage? Remember the bruises, Court. Teddy and I worked a lot of divorces, have met a lot of wronged wives. He’d have picked up on Melodie’s unhappiness in a heartbeat, and then worked it to his advantage. That’s what he did so well, turning on his Irish charm for the ladies who felt neglected and abused. You’d be amazed to watch him work a divorce case. Even in a no-fault commonwealth like Pennsylvania, smart wives know that having a little leverage, be it a mistress or some iffy business dealings, can go a long way in fattening up the private divorce settlement.”
“Is this where I thank you and Teddy for not putting me through the wringer in our divorce, even though I kept telling your lawyer that anything I had was yours? Not that I had anything to hide, mind you.”
Jade made a dismissive motion with her hand, her mind locked tight on where she was going. “Shh. I’m on a roll here.”
“I’ll make a note not to get back to that subject later,” Court said, grinning at her. “All right, Nancy Drew, carry on. I’m impressed, I really am.”
“I’ll ignore that crack, too. We know the marriage hadn’t been real for a lot of years. Brainard was being all boyish and penitent to Jolie and Sam, blaming himself, their inability to have children, all that stuff. He didn’t just hint or suggest, he came right out and said it. Honest Joshua, Philadelphia’s next mayor, confessing that he and his wife were the best of friends in an otherwise loveless marriage. Jolie said she wanted to puke, except the guy is so good at coming off all boyish and sincere that she was mad at herself for disliking him. Oh, damn it…”
Court covered her hand with his own. “What’s the matter? Something’s bothering you. What are you thinking that obviously hasn’t occurred to me?”
“What if Melodie saw her chance to lord it over Joshua, and told him she’d given Teddy some of his hair, his toothbrush, whatever? No, maybe not that. That would be stupid, because then she’s smack in the middle of a public scandal. She wouldn’t have wanted that. I mean, she would have left Brainard long ago, right, unless there was something in the marriage for her. Money, position, that sort of thing. Less stupid, making it plausible, is that she threatened Brainard with something Teddy had told her, in order to scare him. Sort of an ‘I know what you did’ kind of threat that would get her something she wanted. Blackmail. People are that kind of stupid all the time. And it always backfires.”
“What would she have wanted?”
“Like maybe she was tired of playing the game of public happy family, lousy private life, and she wanted a divorce after the election and half his considerable wealth in exchange for her silence? Or maybe she was a romantic, still loved the bastard, and the demand was that good old Josh keep it zipped and come home once in a while. Maybe Tarin was the only straying he ever did—but I’m doubting it, not if he and Melodie weren’t living as man and wife all these years. The guy’s ego couldn’t take not having it, and other parts of him, stroked on a regular basis.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of a TV cop show, do you know that, Jade? Who writes your dialogue?”
Jade felt herself blushing. “Sorry. Cop talk again. It can be a little raunchy, but it doesn’t really mean anything and keeps a person from feeling too much when facts are what we need to concentrate on. Teddy didn’t bother to watch his words around me. But let’s get back to this, okay? Does anything I said make sense to you?”
“I think so, yes. Especially the part about Melodie trying to hold what she thought she knew over Brainard’s head and Brainard deciding that his wife—and of course, Teddy—had to go. Kill one, blame it on the other one, play the grieving widower all the way to City Hall in November. The press has already all but ordained him, his wife’s murder passed over in favor of concentrating on the bereaved husband who will press on through this personal tragedy for the good of the city. Very neat, a tidy, convenient solution to all his problems.”
Jade closed her eyes for a moment. “Kills Tarin, kills his own son and then stands there as Tarin is buried, not even blinking. Nearly two decades later, another problem slams him in the chops. What can he do? So he thinks, hey, if it worked once to solve his problems, murder, that is, why couldn’t it work again? They say it’s the only thing that gets easier the more you do it—killing people. Joshua Brainard is a monster, isn’t he? A sociopath with no heart or conscience.”
“If we’re right, yes. If we’re wrong, he’s the wildly popular and lovable guy with a fistful of top-tier Philadelphia lawyers ready to strip us all to our skivvies in a civil lawsuit. Which begs the question—what next? We’re still working on that slim margin of facts up against a ton of conjecture.”
“Yes, but what if we’re right, down-the-line right, start to finish? I don’t think this can wait for Matt and Jessica to get back. We can’t hold off a moment longer than we have to, not with the news about Tarin White not being a Fishtown Strangler victim going to hit the papers at any time. We’ve got nothing to connect Brainard to Teddy’s murder, not a damn thing. We need a confession.”
“Back to Teddy. Right. Nothing like keeping our priorities straight.”
“Don’t do that, Court. Yes, back to Teddy. What happened to Tarin and her baby was horrible, but Teddy was my father, damn it. Tarin is our one big piece of leverage there and I don’t want to lose it. I think we have to confront Brainard immediately, Court. Just go right in, head-on, and slap him with what we do know, and hope he slips up, says something incriminating. We get that, and it’s like dominoes—they all start to fall.”
“Fine. With one caveat. I want to wait until Jessica and Matt get back. You said they’ll be home tomorrow night. Excuse the cop talk, but it always helps to have a badge along.”
“No, not Matt. He’s already skating on thin ice with the department, according to Jessica. We’ll do it ourselves, tomorrow morning. Unless you’d rather not go with me, and I’d certainly understand if you didn’t want to. I can take Bear Man with me. As Sam said when Jolie pulled one of her stunts that backfired on him, you have to do business in this town.”
“Now I guess I’m caught between bragging—saying Brainard can’t hurt Becket Hotels—and being a wimp and pointing out that, if we’re wrong or just can’t prove what we’re saying, Brainard will use all his political clout as mayor to drive me crazy with inspections and zoning changes and you name it every time I want to put up a new towel rack in the hotel. Let’s stick with bragging—I’m going with you.”
Jade quickly closed the file in front of her and stacked all the folders together on the coffee table. There was still one more case, the most personal of the cases—that of scholar athlete Terrell Johnson. But that had to wait. “Your call, Court, but thank you. I’m going to go upstairs and check Joshua’s official Web site, see where he’s making campaign appearances tomorrow.”
“Out of curiosity, what do you plan to say to the man?”
“All right, let’s review.”
“Please. I like to think I’m a fairly intelligent man, but I have to tell you that it’s getting so a man can’t tell the players without a scorecard. You want to be the one who tells him about Tarin, correct? That’s your opening?”
“See? You do know what I’m planning. Matt said it will be a day or two before the press learns that Tarin White was not one of the Fishtown Strangler’s victims. Knowing how City Hall leaks, knowing that Brainard’s father knows everyone down there, I’d say one day. I think I want to be the one who breaks that particular piece of news to Joshua Brainard. I want to tell him we know he paid for Tarin’s dental implants—that should work for starters—and then hit him with the rest. I’ll be able to tell a lot from his reaction to those two facts. Then I’ll pile on a little with one other piece of information—that we know he donated the plot for Tarin’s burial so that she wasn’t buried in a potter’s field like some charity case.”
“When did we find that out?”
“We didn’t. We just know some anonymous donor came forward and fronted the money for the private plot. We just say we know it’s him, and maybe he admits it, maybe he doesn’t.” She rubbed her palms together carefully as, yes, they were still tender. “I’m glad Jessica isn’t here. I’ve been sidelined long enough with waiting for these burns to heal, and then with chasing my tail trying to get somewhere with the Terrell Johnson case. I can’t wait to go at Brainard tomorrow.”
