The Lawyer's Lawyer (16 page)

T
wo days after Felton’s release, Jack received a phone call at the condo. It was about ten. He had just come from an early
morning bike ride and had to retrieve his phone from the saddlebag under his seat.

“Hello?” he said, resting his empty hand on the bike.

“Jack?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Tom Felton.”

Jack was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t recognized his client’s voice. “Hi Tom. How are you? Where are you?”

“Just driving around. I was wondering if you had filed that paperwork yet.”

“Not yet, but I plan on doing it within the next week.”

“Don’t bother, Jack. I’ve changed my mind.”

Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Why would a man turn down the opportunity to receive millions of dollars? It didn’t
make sense.

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“You wouldn’t want to tell me why, would you?”

“I just couldn’t wait, Jack. I just couldn’t wait.”

“I’ll hold on to them for you in case you change your mind,” Jack said, not really understanding Felton’s answer. Felton did
not respond. He’d already hung up.

Jack had barely closed the cell phone when he received another call. It was Henry.

“Hey, what’s up?” Jack asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Nope. I’m leaning on my bike as we speak. Had a great ride this morning. Why?”

Henry didn’t answer right away, causing Jack to think he had lost the connection.

“Henry, are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Listen, Jack, I’ve got some bad news. I was listening to the morning news here in Miami and they were reporting
the murder of a young woman. They wouldn’t release the details. All they would say was that it was a brutal murder. Jack,
the woman’s name was Kathleen Jeffries.”

“Oh my God. It’s not Sam Jeffries’s daughter, is it?”

“I’m not positive, but I remember reading somewhere—I think it was the newspaper accounts when his wife was murdered—that
he had a daughter and her name was Kathleen or Eileen or something like that.”

Jack let his bike fall over and almost fell to the ground himself. The realization of what might have happened was starting
to sink in. He remembered as well that Sam Jeffries had a daughter although he couldn’t remember her name.

Please. Please, let it be some other Jeffries, not Sam Jeffries’s daughter.

It was Henry’s turn to wonder about the connection.

“Jack, are you there?”

Silence.

“Jack?”

“I’m here, Henry. Are you checking into the details of the murder?”

“I don’t have time, Jack.”

“You don’t have time?”

“No. The more I thought about this and the possibilities, the more I thought I need to get on a plane. I’m heading to the
airport right now. My plane leaves in a little over an hour.”

Jack understood, finally. Henry was putting the pieces together.

“Hannah?” he asked.

“That’s my guess, Jack, although Danni’s a possibility. I figure she’s probably heading to the same place I am if she knows.
Will you give her a call just to make sure?”

“I’ll give you her cell phone number, Henry. I don’t think she’ll want to talk to me right about now. And frankly, I don’t
think I could handle that conversation.”

“Jack, I know you don’t want to hear this, but don’t blame yourself if this turns out the way it looks. You were just doing
your job. I’m as responsible as you. We just made a mistake, that’s all.”

“Is it just a mistake, Henry? Do you think Chief Jeffries will see it that way? Maybe I think I’m too smart sometimes. Maybe
I think I know more than the people who put people away for a living. Danni kept telling me to leave this alone, but I just
couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hear her.”

“Stop it, Jack. We don’t even know for sure that it’s him. We’re just speculating.”

“Oh, it’s him, Henry. I know it. I just talked to him. He told me not to file a claims bill. Said he couldn’t wait. I didn’t
know what he was talking about until this moment. He couldn’t wait to kill again.”

“Jack, he’s a psychopath. Nobody can read those guys. You can’t blame yourself.”

“If not me, Henry, who? Here’s Danni’s number. I can’t talk anymore.”

He gave Henry the number and abruptly hung up the phone.

H
enry called Danni right after he hung up with Jack. He was ten minutes from the airport and his plane was leaving in an hour.
He had to park and get through security in that time. He held the phone in his left hand as he sped down the highway doing
close to ninety.

It had been two years since he’d spent any real time with Danni. She’d shown up at the condo that one day after Jack had taken
Felton’s case to express her displeasure, but that didn’t count. He didn’t care about the lapse of time, however. This wasn’t
a social call and now that he’d been put on notice, he wasn’t going to let another person die if he could help it. If it was
awkward, so what.

She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Danni, this is Henry Wilson.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, which Henry expected.

“I don’t know if you heard about the murder in Miami.”

“I did. Somebody from the department called me about fifteen minutes ago.”

Her voice was hard and cold. Henry could feel the antagonism on the other end of the line.

“Danni, I’m on my way to the airport.”

“What for?”

“It’s my understanding that your daughter is still in school at Boulder.”

“Henry, I don’t need your help. I’ll take care of my daughter. Don’t you think you and Jack have done enough?”

Henry ignored the remark. “My flight leaves in less than an hour. I figure now that you know, you’re on your way as well.
And I assume you’ve instructed Hannah not to go home.”

“I have.”

“And to go to a well-populated public place.”

“Yes.”

“When’s your flight?”

“Four hours from now. I have to drive to Tampa.”

“I’ll be there three hours before you. Tell me where to meet her.”

Again there was silence on the other end.

“Danni, this isn’t about me or you, or Jack for that matter. It’s about Hannah. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anything
happen to her. Now where should I meet her?”

“The Boulder Book Store on the mall.”

“Is there a coffee shop nearby?”

“There’s one in the store.”

“Okay, we’ll go there and wait for you to arrive. Then you and I will come up with a plan. Will you call her and tell her
to look for me?”

Silence.

“Danni?”

“Yes, I’ll call her. I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

“It’s the least I can do.”

J
ack sat on the floor after hanging up with Henry. He didn’t want to get up. Getting up meant dealing with what had happened.
Maybe if I just stay here it will all go away.
But he knew that was childish thinking. Besides, it wouldn’t work. No matter where he was, he couldn’t just turn off his
mind. Couldn’t force himself to go to sleep. There was at least one way to turn it off though. He stood up, walked to the
kitchen, grabbed a glass with his right hand, the Jack Daniel’s with his left, and headed for the patio.

He wanted to howl at the moon, although it was a little too early to do that. He wanted to scream about the unfairness of
life. But life hadn’t been unfair to him. He’d lost Pat, his wife, to cancer, but that was a far cry from losing both your
wife
and
your daughter at the hands of a psychopathic murderer. Sam Jeffries, not Jack, had an absolute right to howl at the moon.
Jack took a long pull from the bottle. He hadn’t needed the glass after all.

Only when he was good and drunk could he return to the scene of what he considered his crime. When he was devoid of the ability
to rationalize his actions—that’s when he went back. His soul needed condemnation not vindication.

It was vanity!
that little voice inside his head told him when he arrived at the state of mind he so craved.
It was all about your vanity! Nobody had ever gotten a serial killer off before—nobody but the great Jack Tobin. You should
be proud of yourself, Jack. You did it! And don’t let it bother you, don’t let it ruin your night that the son of a bitch
was actually guilty. Somebody else got killed, it’s true, and there may be more, but there are always casualties on a man’s
road to success. Some have to fall for others to rise. It’s the nature of the universe.

If Henry was there, Henry would have reminded him of the true facts:
You and I came to see Ben Chapman at Chapman’s request, Jack. You didn’t want to take this case. You didn’t even want to look
at the file. I talked you into it. Once you saw this man had been set up by the police, that’s when you couldn’t let it go.
Vanity had nothing to do with it, Jack. Injustice was the culprit.

But Henry wasn’t there.

H
enry didn’t find Hannah at the Boulder Book Store—she found him. She came running up to him as he walked in the door and gave
him a big hug. He hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving two years before. She was a little taller and she looked more grown up
and healthy. That zest for life that college kids possessed seemed to ooze from her pores. She was smiling from ear to ear
at the sight of him.

Kids
, Henry thought, even though he was referring to a twenty-year-old.
They’re so open with their feelings. We could learn a lot from them.

“Hi, Henry,” Hannah said. “I hear you’ve come to rescue me.”

“I don’t know about that,” Henry replied. “I’m just helping your mom out here.”

“Do you really think this guy is after me?”

“I don’t know, Hannah, but we can’t take any chances.”

“Where’s Jack?”

“He’s back in Gainesville. He’s going to do what he can from there.”

“Mom’s pretty pissed at him.”

“It’s understandable, but Jack had his reasons for representing Felton.”

“That’s not what Mom said.”

“I know. Don’t they teach you at school to look dispassionately at all sides of a problem?”

“Yeah. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, this is one of those problems that has many sides, and since it’s about life and death, it brings out the best and
the worst in people. Are you hungry?”

“Kinda.”

“We’re going to meet your mother at the coffee shop here in three hours. Why don’t we get something to eat.”

“Okay. There’s a great vegetarian restaurant right down the street.”

“Are you a vegetarian?”

“No. I’m a vegan.”

“And what exactly does that mean?”

“No meat, no dairy, no eggs, milk, or cheese, and no fish.”

“So what do we eat, the bark off the side of a tree?”

“Very funny,” Hannah said. “You just wait—you’re going to love it.”

Henry didn’t know that he had consented to go to Hannah’s restaurant but she was already on her way.
She’s a lot like her mother
, he decided.

Danni had a lot of time to think on her drive to Tampa and her flight to Denver. Henry would probably have some suggestions
about how best to protect Hannah. Danni felt that nobody could protect her daughter as well as she could. However, something
else very powerful was building inside of her—the need to find Felton and kill him. While Hannah’s security was still paramount,
she trusted Henry to see to it. They weren’t that close and Henry had participated in the decision to help Felton get out
of jail, but there was that day in a small apartment in Miami when Henry could have walked away and saved his own life and
didn’t. He’d had her back, and he would have Hannah’s back no matter what—Danni was certain about that. So if Henry’s suggestions
allowed her to go back to Oakville and find Felton or let him find her, Danni was going to listen. After all, finding Felton
and killing him was the best security of all.

Henry watched Hannah bolt from the chair in the bookstore coffee shop, run to her mother, and throw her arms around her. He
had seen Danni walk through the door a second before Hannah saw her. She’d looked stressed and troubled. Her daughter’s hug
had momentarily replaced that look with a smile of genuine joy. Hannah was slightly taller than her mother now but the two
women looked so much alike. Other people glanced up from their computers, books, and lattes to watch and listen to the reunion.

“You look great!” Danni told her daughter.

“Not as good as you, Mom. You always look great.”

The two women approached the table where Henry was waiting. He stood up and put out his hand. Danni didn’t take it. She walked
around the table and gave him a big hug.

“There’s no animosity between us, Henry,” she whispered in his ear. “You came all the way out here to save my daughter.”

Henry’s response came out before he had a chance to grab it. “I wish you felt the same way about Jack.”

They separated. “Don’t go there, Henry. Not now.”

They all sat down. Danni ordered a coffee, and they chatted a little before getting down to the hard stuff.

“I almost missed my plane,” Danni said. “I was on my way to the airport, stopped at a stop sign not too far from my home,
when I saw this elderly gentleman on the corner struggling to maintain his balance. Suddenly, he went down. I jumped out of
the car and ran to help him up. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

“‘I dunno,’ he says in an Italian kind of New York accent. ‘I just kind of lost my balance.’

“‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

“‘I dunno,’ he says. Now I’m thinking he’s either disoriented or he has other problems. I check him over, ask him how he’s
feeling. ‘Fine,’ he says but he’s still holding onto me. So I get him in the car. I ask him his name and I try to look up
his phone number on my phone. Nothing. I’m not exactly sure what to do—he remembered his name but he had no idea where he
lived—so I asked him on a hunch what his telephone number was. He rattled it right off. Amazing.

“Anyway, I called the number and his wife answered. She told me he had Alzheimer’s and the whole family had been looking for
him for hours. He lived about two miles away so I drove him home. She was out there waiting for him when I arrived.

“‘That’s my wife, Rosemarie,’ he beamed as we pulled up to the house. ‘She’s my heart. Everybody has to have a heart. Rosie
is mine.’

“Rosemarie thanked me profusely and then she gently led him into the house. Why am I telling you this story? Oh yeah, I was
telling you why I almost missed the plane.”

“That’s not the reason.” Henry almost whispered the words.

“Maybe not,” Danni said. “Maybe it affected me so much I wanted to share it. I mean, what a tragedy to see the love of your
life walking around in a stupor. And yet, how beautiful it is to see two people who love each other so much.”

“There’s beauty in seeing a stranger help another human being too, Mom.”

“There you go,” Henry said. “A person to model yourself after.”

Danni immediately changed the subject.

“So, Henry, you said we needed to make a plan. Do you have any ideas?”

“I do.”

“Do you want to share them with us?”

“I thought maybe I’d listen to your thoughts first,” Henry replied.

“I don’t have any. I mean nothing concrete. So I’d rather hear from you.”

“Okay,” Henry began. He leaned in toward them, his arms resting on the table, his enormous hands surrounding his coffee cup
so that it almost disappeared. “Hannah, you’re not going to like this part. I know it’s close to the end of the semester,
but I think you’re going to have to leave school. He knows you’re here and there’s too much open space here even if we moved
your living quarters and tried to watch you all the time. It’s too dangerous.”

Henry paused to let his words sink in and to wait for a reaction.

“I already figured that,” Hannah said, a slight look of disappointment on her face.

Danni didn’t have a reaction to that part.

“Go on,” she said.

“After that, there’s a lot of options,” Henry continued. “Danni, you could take Hannah to Europe or she could even go herself.
The likelihood of Felton getting out of the country at this point in time is pretty low. It’s not impossible but I think Hannah
would be safe out of the country.”

Danni wasn’t buying it. Henry was holding back and she had an idea why.

“What would you do if Hannah was your daughter, Henry?”

“She’s not my daughter,” Henry persisted.

“What would you do if I entrusted her to your care?”

Henry didn’t answer right away. He looked at Danni as if trying to read her thoughts. Danni nodded slightly to let him know
that this was her wish if he wanted to do it.

“I’d take her to New York,” Henry continued. “I have family there, my aunt in particular who lives in Harlem. It’s a city
of over eight million people. We’d drive up so there would be no flight record or anything. She’d be a needle in a haystack,
assuming Felton even thought to look there. I can get her a new ID, if necessary, and I have people to watch her at all times
when I’m not available, which will be a rare occasion, I assure you.

“It’s a short-term solution. I can’t see keeping it up for more than a month, two at the max, but I think Felton will be caught
by that time.”

“I agree with you for the most part,” Danni answered. “He may not be caught, but he’ll be dealt with in that time period.”

Henry stopped at that point. He’d been very reluctant to even offer the plan. Hannah was a twenty-year-old woman who he did
not know very well, he was an ex-convict, and Danni was a retired cop. It didn’t seem feasible that she would trust him to
walk off with her daughter. But she’d asked. She’d even persisted. And he was convinced that he could protect Hannah.

“Do you really want to do this, Henry?”

“I do, Danni—for me and for Jack.”

“Leave Jack out of this,” she said. Then she looked at Hannah.

“What do you think, honey?”

“I don’t want to leave school,” Hannah said. “But if I have to, this sounds like another type of learning experience. I’ve
never been to New York City. And Harlem—wow!”

“You’d be living with real black people, too,” Henry added with a smile.

“That’s the best part, Henry,” she said, smiling. “A new cultural experience.”

“You’re sure?” Danni asked Henry again.

“I’m sure. Are you sure?”

“I can’t explain it, Henry, but I don’t think I’d trust Hannah with anyone else but you. Hannah, are you sure?”

“Yes, Mom. I feel the same way.”

“Then it’s settled. Henry, I’m going to write you a check for a thousand dollars. It should cover the first week or so.”

“No, ma’am.”

“‘No’ what?”

“No, I won’t accept any money. We’ve all got some amends to make here, and I’ve got to do it my way. Besides, I’ve got a lot
more money than you do.”

Henry smiled when he said it, causing Danni and Hannah to smile as well.

“When are you planning on leaving?” she asked.

“Right away. We need to get out of here.”

“But I need to pack and, Mom, you just got here,” Hannah said.

“I know, honey, but we’ll have plenty of time when this is over to enjoy each other’s company.”

“Would you take her to the apartment and help her pack?” Henry asked Danni. “If he’s watching the place, I don’t want him
to see me. If he doesn’t know that I exist, Hannah is a lot safer.”

“Sure,” Danni replied. “I want him to think she’s coming home with me anyway.”

Hannah walked ahead as they left the coffee shop, giving Henry an opportunity to say a few words to Danni alone.

“I know you’re going after him and that’s why you’re leaving her with me. Don’t make me feel like I made the wrong decision
again. Be careful.”

“I will, Henry. I’m going to make that son of a bitch come to me. And when he does, I’m going to be ready for him.”