“He will. Trust me, I know him.”
Her mouth fell open. Until that moment, she’d been too preoccupied to focus on the nature of the judge’s relationship with the man at the door, but there it was. They were close. He’d called her Kathy. And she’d called him— Charlie.
Wait a minute. The gun, the windbreaker. The reference to “real police.” She knew suddenly who he was, who he had to be. And it made her sick to her stomach.
“He’s a cop, isn’t he?” she said. The cop from my brother’s case.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m in your house, alone, and an armed man comes to the door? It matters to me.”
“I can’t get into it. It’s personal. But I promise, he doesn’t want anything from you.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“It’s complicated. Look, I’m sorry for the confusion. I’ll pay extra for the hardship, okay?”
“This is not about money. I agreed to take care of your cat. A man trying to break in—it’s more than I signed up for. I don’t feel safe.”
“That’s understandable. But you’re completely fine. Just stay inside, and when you order in food, check the camera to make sure that—”
“If I’m safe, why check the camera?”
“That’s just a smart thing to do in a city. I’m getting another call, and I need to take it. Okay? Get some rest.”
The call dropped.
Madison snorted. Another call. Right. The judge didn’t want to answer questions, that was all. A cop tried to break into her house. Someone she knew well, who seemed to be tracking her whereabouts. Their entire interaction had an air of impending violence. Yet the judge instructed her not to call 911, because it was personal. Was he a jealous ex-boyfriend?
A cop named Charlie. Charles.
Madison sat down cross-legged on the floor with her phone flashlight and flipped through the documents from Danny’s case, just to be sure she was remembering correctly. Yes. There it was, the very first line in the affidavit: “Detective Charles E. Wallace affirms and says…”
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. She should try to figure out if he was the same guy.
She opened her laptop and googled the name “Charles Wallace” together with “Boston PD.” Several stories popped up, all from the Globe. One of them looked familiar. “Case Closed in Drive-By Shooting.” She’d read that just the other night, after Ty’s party, while researching the judge’s husband’s murder. Studying the accompanying photo and its caption, her stomach sank as she realized it was definitely him. The man at the door just now was pictured in a group photo of the team investigating Matthew Latham’s murder. It was all him. The man at the door, the lead investigator in the judge’s husband’s murder, and the detective on Danny’s case. One and the same. Detective Charles Wallace. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. The woman she’d admired since high school, and connected with so powerfully tonight, was mixed up with a dirty cop who’d failed to solve the murder of her own husband.
Danny claimed the judge was in on the corruption. My lawyer goes way back with this judge. Has her in his pocket. She’s dirty, too. Madison had refused to believe that. What if it was true? She needed to finish the research on that lawyer that the judge had interrupted earlier tonight. She already knew that Logue had numerous disciplinary complaints and had been suspended from the bar, then reinstated. Now, she looked into his cases—at least, what she could find on Google. There was an avalanche of results. Over forty years, he’d represented literally hundreds of mobsters, extortionists, murderers, drug dealers. She went cross-eyed reading the old news articles, yet learned little about his relationship to Judge Conroy. She’d been the judge on some cases where Logue was the defense lawyer, and—going back years—the prosecutor on others. Knowing that didn’t tell Madison much. She needed court records, but couldn’t access them from here.
There were a number of hits on “Logue” and “Wallace” together, though most of those were about the wrong Wallace—a detective named Edward Wallace who’d been murdered in the ’80s, gunned down execution style in his own driveway. Mob retaliation, they said. Case never solved.
Interesting coincidence. Gunned down in his driveway, just like the judge’s husband.
Researching Detective Edward Wallace, she was shocked to learn from his obituary that he was Charles Wallace’s father. That had to mean something—but what? She couldn’t think straight. Her back ached. Her vision was blurry. It was starting to get light outside, with a faint glow showing around the edges of the blinds. She needed caffeine.
Downstairs, she tracked down a bag of espresso, zapping the almond milk to make a halfway decent latte, which she took over to the sofa. The shelves on either side of the fireplace looked straight out of a shelter magazine, white vases and coffee-table books and framed stock photos with no people in them. This house was as sterile as the judge’s office. That seemed odd. Normal people had photos, scrapbooks, souvenirs. A pile of junk mail. Why didn’t the judge? Was she just a neat freak, or did she keep her personal things hidden for some reason?
A thought occurred to her, and she didn’t like it. What if this whole thing was a setup from the start? As in, the judge knew that Wallace would come looking for her, so she asked Madison to stay to act as a sort of decoy. That wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision like it seemed. But premeditated. She had scrubbed her home of personal mementos because she had something to hide. No. Too paranoid.
Yet the thought nagged at her.
It was wrong to pry, to rummage through Judge Conroy’s personal effects trying to ferret out her secrets. That would be an abuse of the trust the judge had placed in her. Unless, of course, that trust was itself a ruse. She couldn’t stop thinking about Wallace at the door. His anger, his borderline violence. The judge had been looking over her shoulder all through dinner. She knew Wallace would come for her, which meant she intentionally put Madison in a dangerous situation. And what about Danny? How much danger was he in because of these people?
She flicked open the photos on her phone and looked at pictures of her brother. He’d been trying to get his act together when the world turned on him. It was terrible judgment to go to that bar. But one mistake shouldn’t be a death sentence. His freedom, his very life, hung in the balance. She couldn’t afford to ignore the voice in her head telling her that something was rotten in Judge Conroy’s world. She had to investigate. It was the right thing to do.
She got up and walked around the living room, not exactly sure what she was looking for. A blinking red light up near the ceiling caught her eye. It was one of those motion sensors, but suddenly she thought, That could be a camera. She shouldn’t do anything suspicious within range of its creepy red eye. She put her coffee cup in the sink and headed up the stairs, pausing outside the judge’s bedroom. There was another motion sensor on the landing. It was probably nothing, but she could manufacture an alibi, just in case.
“Lucy? Are you in there, girl?” she called, for the benefit of whoever might be listening, before she ventured inside.