Page 197 of Buried Too Deep

He wasn’t soft or afraid now.

It’s her or me. I choose me. She could drive him to Mexico. He would end her there and he’d be free.

I hope her heart is right with the Lord. Otherwise she’d be going straight to hell.

Alan feared that was his fate as well.

At this point, he’d take as many people with him as he needed to.

The Garden District, New Orleans, Louisiana

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 8:45 P.M.

“I’m starving again,” Val said as they left the police station. “Being careful what you say is hard work.”

It really was, and Cora found that she could eat again, too.

The detective had listened to them with wide eyes that grew wider with every revelation. Cora had decided—with input from Phin, Val, Antoine, and Burke—to tell the detective as much as they possibly could without exposing the people like Alice VanPatten who’d turned to Jack Elliot for help.

Alice hadn’t done anything wrong, except to claim a false alibi. At a minimum, she’d perjured herself with the authorities at the time. Worst case, she could be held for conspiracy to commit murder, since she’d known that Jack had killed her husband but had hidden the truth, and she could still be prosecuted for that.

So Cora had asked that the team have a conference call as Val had driven from the psychiatric hospital back to the city. Timothy and Beatrice Caulfield had joined them as well, agreeing that their story needed to be part of what was shared with NOPD.

The Caulfields were anxious about the possible fallout but agreed that the benefit of taking Alan Beauchamp down was worth the risk of any legal ramifications of admitting to the private adoption. Ashley and her parents wouldn’t be safe until Alan was in custody.

Technically, the couple had done nothing wrong. They’d thought they were participating in a legitimate transaction.

At least that’s what they kept insisting aloud. Cora had heard the doubt in their voices.

They’d known what they’d been doing twenty-three years ago. But confirmation that Jennifer Beauchamp had been unwilling to part with her child had shaken them soundly.

As it should have, Cora thought sadly. But that was water under the bridge now. Ashley had had two good parents whose care for her had likely been much better than she would have received at the hands of Alan Beauchamp.

Cora really hated that man.

So she’d told Clancy everything she could and he’d said he’d bring Alan Beauchamp in for questioning right away. He’d already been investigating Patrick Napier. The detective had pieced together much of what they already knew—the Renaissance-era paint, the gallery owned by Patrick, the connection between Patrick and Vincent Ray through the mentoring program.

Vincent had admitted that Patrick had paid him to set Cora’s attic on fire.

That had been a blow.

Then Clancy had shared that they’d found the black Camry that had followed her—and that there had been a body in the trunk. The victim was Sanjay Prakash, twenty-five years old, a clerk at one of the rental car companies at the airport. Both the Camry and the minivan seen in Cora’s driveway had been rented in his name.

They were still looking for the white van that had been in front of Medford Hughes’s house the night the man had been murdered. The white van that had killed a carful of college kids as it had fled the scene.

Clancy wasn’t sure who’d killed the man found in the trunk of the Camry. At the moment, he had eight bodies in the morgue—Medford Hughes and his wife, the four college kids, Sanjay Prakash, and Minnie Edwards—and three suspects—Alan, Sage, and Patrick. Clancy wasn’t sure who’d done what, but he was now looking for all three of them.

That Patrick might have killed so recently left her numb.

But not so numb that she shared everything with Clancy. If Patrick chose to share his and Jack Elliot’s client list to get a plea deal, then the police would find out. Cora wouldn’t help them with that, though. Clancy had asked for the documentation they’d found on her father’s old computer, and Cora had promised to get it to him when she got back home.

Antoine had been busily creating the documentation while she, Phin, and Val had been in Clancy’s office. He said it would be simple to craft a note from Jack Elliot to his wife saying that he was doing a favor for an old college friend, helping transport an infant to her newly adoptive parents. The note would look like it had been created twenty-three years ago.

It wasn’t a perfect scenario and didn’t explain the Swiss bank account, but it protected the people who her father had risked his life for. Who he’d ultimately lost his life because of.

Maybe she wasn’t so hungry after all.

But she was hot and itchy. “I’ll just be happy to get this Kevlar off. Can we go to my house, Val?”

---