“Until now.”
He nodded.
The chief couldn’t fire Montrose because he was retired. She supposed it was possible he could lose his pension. “Why now?”
“I lost my wife to a stroke three months ago, and last week I found out I have terminal cancer. There’s nothing that matters they can take from me at this point.”
It was a long while after Montrose left before Finley stopped staring out the window. It was dusk by then. Streetlights had flickered on, and the children who’d been playing in yards had gone in for the night. The air was oddly still, the humidity too thick for it to move.
Detectives were not that different from prosecutors when you got right down to the basics. Both wanted to come out the winner in the end. Solve the case. Bring the perp to justice. Deals were made. Compromises. Even in light of what Montrose had told her, Finley could see how the right course had appeared to be clear cut. They had overwhelming evidence. It was all there. Motive, of sorts. Opportunity. Means. Why borrow trouble by deviating down some other path and diluting the case?
Renewed fury tightened her lips. Because it was the right thing to do.
What kind of decisions and deals had been made in Derrick’s case? Don’t look at this. Do look at that. What counted and what didn’t?
These types of compromises were the reason she would never go back to this DA’s office. She couldn’t. Not after what she’d been through. Like most students of the law, she’d come out of school thinking she would conquer evil and injustice. Be a hero to those in need. But that wasn’t how it turned out. There were the deals and the compromises—for the greater good. Some DAs took it further than others, and Briggs was one of those. He chose the easier route.
Maybe Lance Legard prompted his own murder by setting out to destroy Seth Henderson. Maybe Henderson caused the whole thing by falling for the damned P-trap and cheating on his wife.
Could have been exactly the way Holmes stated. He’d wanted what Legard had and in the heat of the moment decided to take it. Although that scenario was not nearly as likely. Humans were creatures of habit. Habits weren’t abruptly changed without some sort of prompt.
But what if Lance Legard had been sexually abusing his daughters?
Maybe Sophia decided to take care of the problem. Or it could have been Cecelia as Holmes now claimed.
But what if it was none of the above and Cherry Prescott had decided to make Legard pay for damaging her plans?
Henderson’s wife had insisted the other woman looked enough like the Legard daughters to pass herself off as one of them. In the end the woman had landed on her feet, but she’d gone through some bad times first. It would have been difficult to see any sort of good ending during those hard times.
The biggest question in Finley’s mind was, Why would Charles Holmes take the rap for anyone? What was in it for him? He had no wife or children. No siblings or parents still alive.
What did he hope to gain? Notoriety? A name in the country music industry one way or another?
There had to be an endgame.
The pieces will come together. They always do.
Derrick would have said that if he were here. He had told her so many times that no one was better at figuring out puzzling cases than her.
But that was before she lost him and then lost her mind. Who knew if her brain would ever function as well as it once had? She had worked numerous cases for Jack already without any slips. This one was different, though. There were far more missing pieces. Far more pieces, period.
Not to mention lots of possible suspects beyond the confessed killer.
She needed a hot shower. A good stiff drink and a long mindless movie before bed. But that would never happen. No matter how interesting the movie, she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind from wandering back to this case, or to the one that stayed close to the edges of her thoughts day and night.
Derrick’s case.
In the bedroom she reached beneath the mattress on her side of the bed and removed the folder she kept there. She eased onto the rumpled quilt and opened the folder. The image of Carson Dempsey stared back at her. One of the wealthiest people in the country. He’d created a pharmaceutical empire. There were rumors that he was utterly ruthless and his tactics with the competition could be lethal, but there was no proof of any of those rumors. His support to this city made him a hero. Dempsey’s influence was formidable and far reaching.
His one and only son, on the other hand, was a drug-addicted piece of shit. Finley couldn’t prove it, but she was certain he had raped more than one woman and gotten away with it. But that last time, he’d made a mistake. His victim had scratched him. He hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared. Either way, she’d had the intelligence and the wherewithal to protect her hands until she was at the hospital having the evidence collected. The other women who’d come forward couldn’t prove their allegations, but this one could, and Finley had only needed one.