Daniel (4 page)

Chapter
4

Doyle was in his office when Daniel went
to find him the next morning. He was a huge man, and he seemed to be fitting in
well with the company. One of the things he’d wanted to do when he’d signed on
was be able to run the security team as he saw fit. After the help he’d given
them before, Royce and all of them had agreed.

“I need your help on something. It’s
about a woman. And her kid, she has a kid.” Daniel tried to calm himself and couldn’t.
The woman had sounded terrified and he couldn’t do a damned thing about it. “Her
name is O’Reilly Harlequin, and she lives at…. Why aren’t you writing this
down?”

He’d driven by her house last night and
stood at the gate. He hadn’t touched it, but stood there, listening to the hum
of the electricity running through it. Then he’d driven by again this morning,
wondering if she ever left the compound. He hadn’t seen anyone either time.

“Don’t need to. Her name is O’Reilly
Harlequin, only child of Olivia and Reilly Harlequin. The dad died when she was
a baby, hit and run that never turned up any arrests. Her mom remarried when
O’Reilly was five to a man who had a daughter already. Her name was Meagen
Harper. She was a class act, too.”

“Was? Her sister is dead?” Doyle nodded.
“Why do you know so much about her? Is she in trouble?”

He reached behind him and unlocked the
bottom drawer to his cabinet. He laid a file in front of him and looked at him.
“It’s not pretty, not all of it. I’ll give it to you like we figured it out,
all right?”

Daniel nodded, sure that this was going
to be horrible. He looked at the newspaper clipping that showed a young girl
and a large vase. He couldn’t make out the design, but thought it was pretty
enough.

“O’Reilly was twelve when she made that.
There was this contest in her hometown that was sponsoring an essay contest,
some big corporation that was trying to make a community impact. Winner won a
trip to Paris to study art for a year. The essay was to be about earth.”

He looked at the picture again in the
clipping and took the better photo when Doyle handed it to him. His breath
caught. The design on the vase was stunning. At the center of the piece was a
large tree. The tree was bare of anything other than large branches. There was
a single leaf on the topmost branches that seemed to strain out. Something was
written at the base of the tree. Daniel looked up at Doyle when he spoke them.

“All that we have, all that we will ever
be, is in our nature. Whether it be in ourselves or in that which surrounds
us.”

“She won.”

Doyle shook his head and laughed. “No,
she didn’t win the contest, but she did win the hearts of those who were at the
park that day.” He handed him another picture. “About a week after she was disqualified,
a big news dump happened. From all over the world, news vans showed up to see
what they’d been asked to come and witness. See, the step-daddy thought they’d
done an injustice to his new daughter and was going to prove them all wrong.
They’d called her a cheat.”

“On what grounds? Couldn’t they have
figured it out that she didn’t write it?”

Doyle laughed again and put a DVD in his
computer. “O’Reilly didn’t just write the poem, she threw the vase and designed
the tree. She was accused of being a fraud as well as cheating. They objected
to the ‘paper’ she’d used, and then when that didn’t fly, they said she was
saying someone else’s work was hers. The media blitz was to prove she did it
all.”

The video started out with a picture of
a potter’s wheel. He’d not had the occasion to use one, but he’d seen them when
he’d been in law school. When a little girl walked up to it and sat behind it,
it took him several seconds to realize it was the woman he’d seen.

Daniel watched in stunned silence as she
starting pulling the pot. He couldn’t believe it when she had to stand up to
finish the sides. And he continued to watch when she formed it with her hands,
curving out the sides to make the shape softer, using only a sponge and her
hands. She finished it and stood. He held his breath when she walked in front
of it. He could see flashes going off and knew she was getting her picture
taken with it. But she wasn’t finished.

She walked over to a large easel and
pulled a sheet of paper about four foot square off a pad. She clipped it to the
easel with a cardboard as its board. She picked up a pencil and looked back at
the camera.

“I don’t know what to draw. Does anyone
have a suggestion?” There were several shouts from the crowd, and when the
camera panned around, Daniel got his first glimpse of Doyle. The man flushed
and told him to pay attention.

When the younger O’Reilly turned back to
the paper, he watched her hand slide effortlessly over the sheet. Even after
only a few minutes he could see the picture emerging. She was drawing a woman
standing next to a cameraman. Both he and Doyle watched as she drew them over
the large sheet until she turned back around. The camera was moved around to
the point of making him sick before it settled on a cameraman and his anchor. It
looked as if she’d drawn them perfectly. Even the microphone in her hand was
nearly perfect.

“Mother fuck. She’s that good.” He
looked at Doyle. “Please tell me she won, after all. Someone that talented
should be teaching in Paris, not learning.”

“She didn’t win. But….” Doyle held up
his hand when Daniel started to speak. “But she did get to go to Paris the
following year. The community that the company was trying so hard to win over
rallied behind the girl and put them out of business.”

Daniel was thrilled. He smiled, thinking
about her getting to study there and doing it because she had truly won. He
looked at the next picture.

“Her mom and step-father were killed
while she was away. She didn’t find out until they were both buried. Her
sister, Meagen, was driving when someone went left of center and took them all
out. Figured that the girl changed her life because of that night. Because the
sister, Meagen, became a first-class trouble maker afterwards.”

Daniel nodded. He’d seen firsthand what
the death as tragic as the one in the picture could do to someone. He took the
next pictures and felt his belly lurch. These pictures showed an older woman,
perhaps in her late twenties, lying in what appeared to be a bed of blood.

“Then one night, about ten years later,
the police called O’Reilly to tell her that her sister was hurt and that she
was asking for her. That’s the way Meagen ended up. We took the pictures of
everything when we finally got word from the locals. Good thing too, ‘cause of
what happened later. O’Reilly had already come and gone by the time I got
there, having come to her sister’s deathbed and been told that she wasn’t worth
anything, and that Meagen hated her. Or so O’Reilly told the cop before she
left.”

“You don’t think that’s what happened. You
think something else was said and what? She knows who her killer was?” Doyle
shook his head. “Then what? What has you remember a case this old and keep
files on it?”

He put another picture in his hand. “That
man. His name is Humberto Carver. He’s who we’ve been looking for, both then
and now. There’s a file on his known activities dating from before O’Reilly was
born.”

His rap sheet was as long as two of his
arms and still some. Drugs, theft,
embezzlement
,
attempted murder, homicide, assault, rape…he looked up at Doyle.

“But no convictions. Why?” Daniel looked
over the papers, not really expecting Doyle to answer. Then he saw a name he’d
heard. He looked back at the former agent. “Meagen Harper was one of his?”

“She wasn’t just one of his runners as
it says there, but she, for all we could find, was his mistress, too. That is
up until about the time of her death. She hooked up with him about the time
little O’Reilly was headed off to Paris.”

He handed him the last thing in the
file. It was a birth certificate. He looked it over and frowned before handing
it back. “I’ve met the kid. He seems okay. What does her son have to do with
all this other shit, and why is he a part of your file?”

“Look at the date. The date of the kid’s
birth. I don’t know much about kids and babies, but I know enough to know that
a woman in Paris can’t have a baby in North Dakota, and I’m thinking she was a
mite young to be having him.”

The kid was going to be twelve in a few
weeks, and he’d said that O’Reilly had gone to Paris around the age of thirteen.
The boy wasn’t hers.

“Whose is he? The sister?”

Doyle shrugged. “Maybe.”

“The boy calls her ‘Mom.’ Benny, she
called him Benny.” Daniel started pacing. “You think she picked up the boy
while she was there, don’t you? When she went to see her dying sister, she
picked up the kid and brought him back with her.”

“Meagen delivered him, that’s all we
know for sure. She’d had a baby prior to her death, but there was no record.
When we went back to the hospital, they didn’t know any different, so we
figured she’d given birth and claimed to be her sister. She might have known
then her life wasn’t going to be long for this world.”

“I don’t think it’s over, either.” He
sat down and told him about the phone call and the way her voice sounded. “I
think he or someone had called her just before I did the second time. From what
she begged me not to do, I think he threatened her and the kid. She begged me…
him
…not
to hurt the boy.”

“That’s not good. Not good at all. The
little potter has no idea what she’s up against, and if Carver finds her, she’s
as good as dead.” Doyle picked up his phone, but before he dialed he looked at
Daniel. “Can you get to her? Talk to her? She’s going to need to have
protection.”

“I’ll try. I don’t know how much help I
can be, but I’ll certainly try.”

~~~

Reilly drove to the end of the drive and
saw a car parked across the road. She reached blindly for the gun lying on the
seat next to her as the door opened. When Mr. Hunter stepped out of his huge
black SUV, she nearly wept with relief. Then she got pissed.

Getting out of her car without hiding
the fact that she was armed, she went to the gate and punched in the code. It
would open for her now and lock up immediately after she passed through the
gates. If someone touched the gates or tried to climb over it, she’d be in
trouble. There was enough voltage running through them to power a small city.

“I’d like to speak to you. I know that
you don’t have any reason to like me, but—”

“I don’t like you. You’re a liar and a
pushy man. I know I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that yesterday, but you
came at a bad time, and I was…nervous because I didn’t know you.”

“Did it have anything to do with another
phone call? The one where you were threatened?” She turned to him, suddenly
terrified. She looked up and down the road to see if anyone was coming. “I can
help you.”

She laughed. “Sure you can. Tell me, Mr.
Hunter, what is it you think you can help me with? My fashion sense? You do
have a great deal of it all your own. I don’t know anyone else that wears a three-piece
suit on the weekend. How about my finances? I have more money than I can spend
and, as I read last night, so do you. Could it be that you think I need your
legal advice? No, I have all that and more than I need now.”

“I know about your son. I know he’s not
yours.”

The world tilted around her. She didn’t
know how she ended up on her passenger seat but suddenly she was there and he
was telling her to breathe. How she was supposed to draw a breath again was
beyond her. And she knew that there was no reason for her to pretend that she
didn’t know what he was talking about. She had already given that away.

“I’d like to get up now, please.” He
lifted her chin up and peered into her eyes intently. “I’m fine. Please, let me
go.”

“I need to speak to you. I want to help
you.” He was the last person she wanted help from. “Please, O’Reilly, let’s
talk.” He let her go but didn’t move back.

“No one calls me that. It’s just Reilly.”
She pushed him back, marveling for a few seconds at the hardness of his chest. “I
don’t want to speak to you. I don’t know what you think you know, but Benny is
my son.”

She walked around her car and got in,
and slammed the door before he could grab for it, sad that she’d missed his
fingers. After she started the motor, she started to pull forward when she
remembered the fence. She rolled down her window and gave him a warning.

“The gate is armed. If you’re not on the
other side when I go out, you’ll be here for a while. The fence is
electrified.” She nodded to the power signs hanging low on the fences around
her home. “I would really hate to have to peel you off it when I get back.”

“This isn’t over, O’Reilly. I’m a very
persistent man.”

“Good for you. And it’s Reilly, and I’m
a fucking bitch.”

She drove around for nearly an hour before
she remembered where she’d been going. She was suddenly glad she’d been
thinking of picking up her mail at the post office first, then running some
errands, or she’d be late for lunch with her agent. She pulled in front of the
restaurant fifteen minutes early.