Page 41 of Lies He Told Me

“I understand.” Kyle plays with his hands. “Some strange things are happening to this woman, Silas’s former lawyer.People are messing with her. Broke into her home, moved things around, put a dead rat in her kid’s Halloween bag —”

“A dead rat. Huh.” That seems to get Grafton’s attention. “But why would Cagnina have a beef with her? I mean, lawyers annoy all of us, but we don’t — we don’t blame them for what their clients do.”

“That’s what I can’t figure,” says Kyle. “It’s just that all this weird stuff is happening to her all of a sudden, and Cagnina just got out of prison five months ago. Seems like it might be connected.”

Grafton’s eyes narrow. “Silas’slawyer,” he mumbles. “Silas, of all people.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, well, it’s probably nothing. Really just an old wives’ tale.”

“Tell me, please,” says Kyle, feeling like he’s getting some traction.

“Hell, it’s not even an old wives’ tale. Just something one of the agents said once. After the whole thing was over. After Cags was convicted on tax evasion and we had at leastsomethingto show for years of hard work.”

“Yeah? What did this agent say?”

“And he was half in the bag, at that. Most of us were. A big blowout after the conviction. You know how cops can drink. Thing was, I was on some medication at the time, so I had to watch myself.” He shakes his head. “Yeah, Frankie Blair, one of the lead agents. That boy could drink back in the day.”

Kyle is about to come out of his skin. “What did Agent Blair say, Ollie?”

“He said, and I’m pretty sure this is a quote, it stuck with me so much. He said, ‘Are we really sure that Silas is dead?’”

Kyle draws back. “I’m not … I’m not following.”

“Like he faked his own death,” says Grafton. “Put another body in his place and escaped. Could you even imagine? And where would a guy like that even go?”

Kyle tries with all his might to maintain a poker face. Where, indeed, would a guy like that go?

Probably someplace nondescript. A small town where you could live anonymously. Until something thrusts you into the spotlight.

Something like a heroic rescue of a drowning man in a choppy river, all captured on a video that goes viral.

No,Kyle thinks.It can’t be.

Did Silas Renfrow move to Hemingway Grove and marry his former lawyer?

THIRTY-NINE

WHEN I WALKED INTO the office of the senior partner, Howard Shimkus, fifteen years ago, I didn’t realize that my legal career in Chicago was about to end. It was almost two weeks since the federal government had notified us of Silas Renfrow’s death but only days since Howard and I had talked about it.

“Oh, good, the motion to dismiss?” he asked when I walked in holding a document in my hand. When I put it down on his desk, he took one look at it and immediately knew it wasn’t the pleading he’d been expecting. “Jesus, Marcie, what are you doing?”

“Liam Herrin,” I said, pointing at the printout of the online article I’d just handed him. “Escaped from a maximum-security prison in Northern Ireland in 1971. Lured a guard into a laundry shack, killed him, changed clothes with him, then set fire to the shack. Prison officials thought it was Herrin who died. By the time they learned otherwise, Herrin was long gone.”

Howard kept a poker face, nodding carefully.

“That’s what it means, Howard. ‘Pulling a Herrin.’ He wasn’t talking about a bird. He was talking about killing a prison guard and changing places with him. Escaping.”

Howard was good. A trial lawyer of his experience was long adept at handling surprises, at holding still amid a hurricane. He brought his hands together in a steeple.

“That’s why you were so upset when I mentioned that phrase,” I said. “Because it means Silas Renfrow escaped —”

“We don’t know that Silas did any such thing,” he said, his voice a strange mixture of calm and aggression. “Do we? Do you have some special insight into what happened in that detention facility that no one else seems to have?”

I didn’t, and he knew I didn’t. I had no proof. What I had, however, was Howard’s reaction that night when I mentioned Silas’s Herrin reference, swearing me to secrecy, praying with all his might that I hadn’t mentioned it to the FBI.

“To say nothing of the attorney-client privilege,” said Howard. “Ever heard of that?”

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