Kingsley Baby Trilogy: The Hero's Son\The Brother's Wife\The Long-Lost Heir (53 page)

“Nothing. I just remembered, that’s all.”

Her father sighed wearily. “Your mother never thought money, or material things, were important because she’d never wanted for anything. She came from money, and money
isn’t
important if you’ve always had it. I grew up differently. Your Uncle Harper and I had to fight and scratch for everything we got, but we were both determined to claw our way out of the poorhouse and make something of ourselves. When your mother left, I’d just been hired by one of the biggest law firms in Memphis, and Harper was Edward Kingsley’s campaign manager. We were connected, Bradlee. In solid with the movers and shakers in this town. Against all odds, my brother and I had made it, and then suddenly, out of the blue, your mother wanted me to just give it all up. Start all over out there in California.”

It had hardly come out of the blue, but Bradlee decided not to quibble. “I’d forgotten that Harper was Edward Kingsley’s campaign manager,” she murmured, though she hadn’t really. Harper Fitzgerald had managed many successful political campaigns, both state and national. In fact, Bradlee didn’t think he’d ever lost one. That was why his services were still so heavily in demand even at his age.

Her father leaned toward her. “Harper was brilliant back then. We both were, if I do say so myself. We knew how to handle ourselves, how to turn almost any situation to our advantage. But to pull Kingsley’s campaign out of the toilet like that, to get him elected after all the negative publicity following his wife’s death and his untimely second marriage to Pamela…I didn’t think he could do it. No one did. I thought he’d go down with a sinking ship.”

The waitress brought their orders, and after she’d placed his plate in front of him, Bradlee’s father picked up his empty glass and rattled the ice cubes. The waitress hurried off to bring him a fresh drink.

Bradlee stared down at her own plate. The grilled shrimp smelled delicious, but she wasn’t hungry. Toying with her rice, she watched her father attack his food with gusto.

“How did Harper manage to save Edward’s campaign?” she finally asked, when her father made no attempt to pursue their previous conversation.

He speared a shrimp, savored it, then glanced up. “It was a fluke, really, but Harper had the foresight to see it when the rest of us didn’t. He called it the sympathy factor. The kidnapping swayed public opinion in Edward’s favor, and Harper played it for all it was worth.”

“That seems a little cold-
blooded.” Bradlee pushed her plate aside, untouched.

Her father gestured with his fork. “Politics is a cold-
blooded sport, Bradlee, not for the faint of heart. Besides, it wasn’t as if Harper kidnapped the boy or anything. He saw an opportunity and seized it, and something good came out of a tragedy. What’s wrong with that?”

Bradlee didn’t bother to explain. What was the point? She and her father operated on different wavelengths. They always had. She suddenly had new sympathy for her mother.

“You and Harper were both at the fund-
raiser the night Adam was kidnapped, weren’t you?”

Her father polished off his second drink. “Along with a lot of other people. Anyone who was anyone.”

“Like who?”

He shrugged, glancing around for the waitress. “All the Kingsleys, of course. The mayor. A senator, a couple of congressmen, all the party leaders. Even Cotton Weathers made an appearance, although we never could figure out how that son of a bitch got past the guards. He sure as hell didn’t have an invitation.”

“Who was Cotton Weathers?”

Her father spotted the waitress and beckoned her over. “What’s your name, honey?”

She glanced at Bradlee, who could do little more than give her a sympathetic smile. “Amber.”

“Amber.” He held up his empty glass. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir—”

“I thought I made myself clear. There’s not much that annoys me worse than having an empty glass sitting in front of me.”

The woman’s face flushed a bright red. Bradlee said, “Come on, Dad.”

He ignored her. “Now I suggest you run along and bring me another drink. And when you see the glass about halfway empty, start making plans to fetch me another.
Capisce?
”

Amber looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to burst into tears or dump the remainder of his lunch on his head. Bradlee was rooting for the latter. But instead, Amber managed to smile sweetly and this time, it was she who shot Bradlee a sympathetic glance. “I’ll be right back with your drink, sir.”

“Dad, for God’s sake,” Bradlee said in exasperation. “Did you have to make a federal case out of it?”

Her father’s eyes narrowed on her. “How many times have I told you, Bradlee, you have to know how to treat these people. They’ll walk all over you if you let them.”

The waitress brought his drink, paused only long enough to ask if they needed anything else, then hurried away. Bradlee couldn’t blame her. She wished she could leave, too.

“Now then,” her father said, resuming his meal as though nothing had happened. “Where were we?”

“You were telling me about Cotton Weathers.”

“Right. He was the lieutenant governor back then, and he fully expected to be governor when Conners retired. That is, until Edward announced his intention. Cotton hated Edward. There was bad blood between him and all the Kingsleys. Never knew why exactly, except that it went back generations. Cotton swore that night he would do anything to stop Edward from becoming governor. He gloated that he’d been the one to leak the story to the tabloids about Edward’s affair with Pamela while his wife was on her deathbed. That very nearly did Edward in. Then Adam was kidnapped and everything changed.”

Bradlee studied her napkin for a moment. “You say Cotton hated Edward Kingsley. Do you think he might have had something to do with Adam’s kidnapping? Maybe he thought Edward would pull out of the race if one of his sons was kidnapped.”

“I don’t think even Cotton was that dumb. Besides, Raymond Colter kidnapped Adam. The man admitted it. He’s serving a life sentence in prison.”

“I know that,” Bradlee said. “But he might have had an accomplice.”

Her father stared at her accusingly, pointing at her with his fork. “I know where all this is coming from. I heard about the accusations David Powers made at breakfast yesterday morning.”

Bradlee looked up in surprise. “From who?”

He shrugged. “From Jeremy Willows.”

She should have known. Jeremy Willows was a partner in her father’s law firm.

“I didn’t think you two were on speaking terms,” she said. “Not after Iris gave you the Kingsley account instead of him.”

Her father grinned—a charming, boyish grin that made him seem far younger than his sixty-
plus years. “He sulked around the office for a few days, but he got over it. Besides, he knows I’ll be retiring in another few years. He’d be a fool to leave the firm now.”

“What all did he tell you?” Bradlee asked, not wanting to stray too far from the subject.

“Just what I said, that Powers accused someone connected to the family of having orchestrated his kidnapping. Which is ridiculous. That woman who disappeared with him—what was her name?—she obviously had a screw loose somewhere. How could anyone believe anything she said?”

“I used to think I saw someone come into the nursery that night,” Bradlee reminded him.

“That was nothing more than a nightmare. Your mother didn’t help matters by carting you off to that psychiatrist. If you ask me, she made things worse.”

“I’m not so sure it was just a nightmare,” Bradlee said.

Her father pushed his plate aside and stared at her. “I don’t know what it was about that boy, but you always did have some kind of fixation about him. Like you had to take care of him or something. That’s what you’re doing now, darlin’, and if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m not sure it’s all that healthy.”

“I’m just trying to help him,” Bradlee defended. “Why is that so difficult for you to understand?”

He leaned toward her, lowering his voice. “I understand this. The moment Iris Kingsley dies, Adam Kingsley will be one of the wealthiest men in this country. A man with that kind of money is bound to have enemies. If you ask me, what happened to him in the past is the least of his worries now.”

* * *

W
HILE
B
RADLEE WAS
having lunch with her father, David had already made the drive up to the state penitentiary. As he sat in the visitors’ room behind a bulletproof screen, he had no idea whether Raymond Colter would agree to talk to him or not. He’d almost convinced himself this was a bad idea to begin with when the door on the other side of the screen opened, and a guard led one of the prisoners through.

In his mind, David had created an image of Raymond Colter from his mother’s description. He’d pictured a cop, mid-
thirties, tall, muscular, good-
looking. What he hadn’t taken into account were the thirty-
two intervening years. Raymond Colter was an old man now, thin and wiry, with grizzled hair and faded eyes. Those eyes narrowed on David as he shuffled over and sat in the chair behind the Plexiglas.

For a long moment, neither of them said anything, just sat staring at each other. David wasn’t sure what it was he felt. This man had taken him from his home, kept him from his family, let the world think he was dead.

I should hate you, he thought. I should despise you for what you did to me.

But for some reason he didn’t. For some reason, David didn’t feel much of anything.

Raymond Colter leaned toward the speaker in the Plexiglas. “So you’re the Kingsley boy, eh? I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve changed.” He grinned, and suddenly the emotions that had eluded David earlier came rushing over him. Anger, like he had never known before, shot through him, and he knew exactly why the bulletproof shield was necessary—not always for the protection of the visitor, but in some cases, in
this
case, for the prisoner’s well-
being.

He leaned toward the speaker. “You’re lucky you’re in prison, old man.”

Something shifted in Colter’s eyes. Remorse? David doubted it. “I’m spending the rest of my life behind bars, and my only son is dead. Don’t tell me I’m lucky, boy.”

David had read about Colter’s son, how he had somehow learned his father was guilty of the kidnapping and had died trying to keep the truth from coming out. Trying to keep an innocent man in prison. At that moment, David couldn’t feel much sympathy for father
or
son.

“Besides,” Colter said, studying him through the glass screen. “What are you complaining about? Looks like Sally did all right by you.”

“Sally?”

“I guess you know her by another name. The woman who took off with you. How is she?”

“She’s dead,” David told him. “But I didn’t come here to make small talk with you. I want to ask you a question, and you damn well better give me a straight answer. You owe me that much.”

Colter gave a short bark of a laugh. “I’m paying my debt. Right here in this stinking hellhole. I don’t owe you anything.”

“Who helped you?” David asked, watching Colter’s face, noticing the tic at the corner of his left eye. “Who paid you to kidnap me?”

Colter laughed. “No one paid me to do anything. I came up with the idea all by my lonesome. I nabbed you from the nursery and had the ransom money all to myself.”

He was lying. David had defended too many sleazes like Colter not to recognize it. It was clients like him who sometimes made sleep hard to come by. “The security at the mansion was tight that night—an alarm system, guards patrolling the grounds. The whole bit. There was no way you could have pulled it off alone.”

“You’re forgetting something.” Colter sat back in his chair and smiled. “The guards were all off-
duty police officers. I worked there myself every chance I got. I knew that place like the back of my hand. I knew the alarm would be turned off that night because of all the guests. I knew exactly when and where the guards would patrol. It was a simple matter to hide on the grounds and wait for the light in the nursery to go out. Then all I had to do was scale the wall to the balcony, carry the boy out of the nursery, and lower him to the ground with a rope.” He seemed to have forgotten that David was that boy.

“Without making a sound?” he asked in disbelief. “Without waking me up?”

Colter shrugged. “Lots of ways to silence a kid.”

“Drugs?”

Colter shrugged again without answering, and David remembered something Bradlee had said under hypnosis. That the shadow had been standing beside his bed, touching his face. Could someone have used drugs—ether, maybe—on him to make sure he didn’t wake up when Colter came into the room? Would that explain the smell Bradlee hadn’t liked?

“All right, supposing you could have avoided the guards,” David said, “and somehow managed to scale the wall to the balcony without being seen. What about the French doors? The nanny swore she’d locked them before she went to bed. And the police found no sign of a forced entry.”

Colter, still smiling, said, “The police figured the nanny was either mistaken or lying because she forgot to lock up before going to bed.”

“Yes, but the problem with that theory is that
you
were the police back then. You made damned sure you got yourself assigned to the investigation. How much evidence did you destroy to cover your own tracks? Or someone else’s?”

Raymond Colter’s dark eyes took his measure. “You’re a smart guy, Kingsley. I can tell you’ve given this a lot of thought. But it was all a long time ago. It’s water under the bridge, as they say. Even if I answered your questions, what’s it going to change? You’ll still be Adam Kingsley and I’ll still be locked away in this rat hole. Take my advice, boy. The past is best forgotten.”

“Yes, but I don’t seem to be able to forget,” David said grimly.

Colter shrugged. “Well, maybe you’d better find a way to do just that. Maybe you’d best get on with your life and forget all about your little conspiracy theories.”

“It’s more than a theory and you know it,” David accused. “What I can’t figure out is why you’re still trying to protect your accomplice. From where I’m sitting, you don’t have much to lose by talking.”