Beneath that, written in a very different hand, were the words, IF I CANNOT AROUSE LOVE, I WILL DESTROY IT.
The final picture was of a man standing in front of the kilns at the Edison Cement factory. He had dark hair and eyes as cold and pale blue as arctic ice. Hiram Davenport at thirty years old. Only it wasn’t. Bleach the hair and add green contact lenses, and I’d seen this man just yesterday, standing near the overpass at Potters Road, holding a book of poetry.
“Jack Hurley,” I said aloud. “Samantha’s assistant.”
Clyde heard the urgency in my voice and scrambled to his feet.
“Jack Hurley is our killer.”
CHAPTER 25
All of us are bruised in places no one can see.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
I ran down the hall to Esta’s room. The paramedics were tending to Esta, and Mac had stepped into the hall to give them room. Through the windows on the other side of the house, the lights of emergency vehicles strobed against the glass.
I touched Mac’s arm as Clyde and I hurried past.
“Let’s go!” I told her. “I’ll explain on the way.”
I punched in Cohen’s number as we went down the stairs and left him a message to call me ASAP. He was out-of-pocket somewhere. My calls were piling up like cops on free-donut day.
Through the front door I saw an ambulance idling, its rear doors open. The yard was filled with Weld and Adams County law enforcement vehicles. Deputies from both counties worked around the house or talked on their radios. A crime scene van was just pulling in as Clyde and I ran outside, Mac right behind us. I found Phillips and told him that we had to head back to Denver, and asked him to be in touch with whatever he found.
“There are photographs and a birth certificate on the desk in the boy’s room upstairs,” I said. “I need to know as soon as you get those fingerprinted.”
“Will do. Pleasure meeting you.” He nodded at both of us. “Come back anytime. This is the most excitement we’ve had around here.”
As I drove, I filled Mac in on what I’d found in Roman’s bedroom. The birth certificate, the photographs of Hiram, Ben, Samantha, and Roman.
“The photo of Samantha was taken in her studio. I recognized it from her website. On the back, she’d signed it to Jack. Below that was another quote, written by someone else. ‘If I cannot arouse love, I will destroy it.’”
“That sounds like our killer.”
“There was another photograph. One of Roman at the cement factory. He looks just like his father, in case we still had doubts about his paternity. But here’s the real knife to the heart. Roman is Samantha’s assistant, Jack Hurley.”
Mac grabbed the oh-shit bar as I went around a tight curve. “He was with them all that time?”
“Keep your enemies close. What I still don’t understand is what made Roman decide to go after the Davenports now. What was the catalyst?”
“I think I can answer that one. Lancing Tate.”
I braked as I entered another curve, then accelerated. “What?”
Mac shot me a triumphant look. “Esta told me a lot while I was sitting with her.”
I was pushing the speed limit, the truck slopping through the mud. I kept a wary eye out for any deer or pronghorn that might come leaping out of the cornfields.
“Go on,” I said.
“According to Esta, Lancing Tate visited her five months ago. He told her that after his father’s stroke, he’d been going through Alfred’s papers and found a journal.”
“And?”
“And what Alfred wrote in his journal suggests that Hiram murdered Raya.”
“What do you mean, ‘suggests’?”
“From what Lancing told Esta, the journal wasn’t definitive. Alfred was suspicious of Hiram, but not certain. He knew about Hiram and Raya’s affair and he wrote that Hiram sent Raya to LA to have an abortion, which clearly she didn’t do. Alfred claims that the night she died, he saw Hiram drive away from the scene just as he was approaching it. Then, forty-five minutes later, Hiram arrived again, pretending it was for the first time.”
“Maybe Alfred Tate wrote that in case someone found his journal, hoping to put the blame on Hiram.”
“I thought of that, too. Shame we can’t ask him directly.”
“So why did Lancing go to Esta with this news instead of the police?”
“She said he wanted her to be the one to report it. My guess is he thought it would look better if the request to open the case came from her, allowing him to stay above the fray. Lancing hadn’t counted on Esta being quite so crazy. Nor could he have known that if Hiram has been paying her all these years, she likely already knew what he’d done. She’d stayed silent about her daughter’s death and accepted Hiram’s blood money twenty-eight years ago. Why would she suddenly agree to kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”
“So Lancing goes to her with this story, and maybe Roman overhears it. Did she say if Roman was there?”
“The three of them sat down together at the kitchen table. According to Esta, prior to Lancing’s arrival, Roman didn’t know that Hiram was his father. It must have come as a terrible shock. All these years, and his father is living only fifty miles away. Then he hears that his father may well have killed his mother.”
“And he goes a little crazy,” I said.
“He must have decided to take Hiram’s family away from him, just as Hiram had taken his. Once he realized that his grandmother has been accepting blood money all these years, he went after her, too.”
My stomach rolled at the thought of the rage and rejection Hurley must have felt in order to extract such a brutal revenge. “He got to the Davenports by worming his way into the family and gaining their trust. Jack was hired only a few months ago. Maybe he tried to sleep with Samantha as part of Ben’s punishment. But she didn’t go for it. Another rejection on top of the news about his father.”
“There’s more,” Mac said. “During the middle of this, I got a call back from my team in Ohio.”
“They talked to the mother of the man murdered there?”
“They couldn’t. Betsy King died two weeks ago. Natural causes. She had a heart attack at work. But they found a friend of her son’s.”
“And?”
“His mother never married his father. Nor did she tell him his father’s name. Just that he was the son of railroad royalty. William King was an alcoholic, which is how he ended up homeless. But at some point, he was sober enough to put up a website. He called himself King of the Road and claimed that he was the son of a railroad magnate.”
I tapped my brakes at a four-way stop, took a quick glance along the tall rows of corn, and powered through. “Roman assumed that William King was Hiram’s son. He’s killing off Hiram’s family.”
“Seems like he’d have more reason to commiserate with William than kill him. The two bastard sons.”
I shook my head. “He wants to wipe out every trace of Hiram Davenport.”