“Did your father kill Pooky, Katy?”
“She nodded right here,” Caitlin says in a taut voice.
“And Dr. Leland. He killed Mr. Henry … and that colored nurse, too.”
“Oh my God. Does she say Viola’s name?”
“No. She slides out of her chair right about here. Totally unconscious.”
“Katy?” Caitlin cries on the recording.
The sound of a blunt impact follows.
“Katy! Katy Regan! Can you hear me?” Silence. “How long have you been drinking? Did you take something?”
I hear a groan but no coherent words. Then there’s a bang, and heavy footsteps on hardwood.
“Right here I saw the empty bottle of pills by the fireplace.”
“Who are you?” yells a male voice, one I recognize from earlier today.
Caitlin stops the recording. “That’s Randall Regan. He came at me, Penn. He would have killed me if he could. I had to fire a shot into the floor to stop him. He got my tape recorder. It fell out of my purse. But at least we have this.” She holds up her phone in triumph. “So, what do you think? As a lawyer?”
I shake my head in disbelief. “As your future husband, I think you’re crazy. As a lawyer … it’s the closest anyone’s gotten to real evidence in the Albert Norris case.”
“The Norris case! Penn, Katy Royal just said her father killed at least seven people, if you count the plane crash—including Viola Turner.”
“I know,” I murmur, troubled by something I can’t quite pin down. “Five minutes ago, I was sure Lincoln Turner had euthanized his mother. Or screwed up trying to revive her.”
“Based on pure conjecture. That’s a theory, and a damned complicated one.” She shakes the phone in my face. “This is Royal’s daughter saying he killed Viola. On tape. Or in digital memory, whatever.”
“She didn’t use Viola’s name.”
Caitlin’s mouth forms an O of disbelief. “What other ‘colored nurse’ could she be talking about?”
“But my scenario explained Dad’s behavior. His willingness to take the fall.”
“Because he believes Lincoln is his son?”
“Right.”
She gives an exasperated sigh. “Maybe Tom does believe that. Maybe Lincoln believes it, too. That explains his willingness to take a DNA test. But I don’t. No way is Tom the father of that man.”
“Why not?”
“Logic, for one thing. You told me Lincoln is blacker than Viola was, right? Tom’s ancestors were Scots-English. He’s as light as I am, and that’s saying something.”
“Lincoln says that’s possible. He’s checked the genetics of it.”
“He’s a disbarred lawyer with zero objectivity! I’d prefer the opinion of an actual geneticist on that.” Her voice gains certainty as she goes on. “Lincoln claims your father has known about him for years, right? Again—no way. Tom wouldn’t have kept that secret for forty years. He would have owned up to it.”
“I’m not sure. Dad has his secrets. He’s never told me what happened to him in Korea.”
“A lot of veterans are like that. If you’d been drafted to go fight somewhere, he’d have told you about Korea. Did Lincoln say or imply that your mother knows anything about him?”
“No.”
She gives me a pointed look. “Do you plan on asking Peggy about Lincoln?”
“Hell, no! Not if I can avoid it.”
“Let me give you the female perspective. Viola was terminally ill. She’d had a hard life, and Lincoln’s probably wasn’t much better. At some point, somebody probably told him he was someone else’s kid. Maybe the stepfather. Lincoln would have confronted Viola, asked who his real father was. What’s she going to say? Your father was a Klan rapist from Mississippi? The math is the same as a pregnancy by your father, you know. And a black woman impregnated by a Klansman has a lot better reason to keep a boy’s paternity secret than one pregnant by a white physician she loved.” Caitlin shakes her head with conviction. “No, she lied. She blamed a one-night stand, a long-gone boyfriend from Chicago, something. Because if she’d told Lincoln his father was a rich white doctor, Tom would have heard from the boy long before now. But he didn’t.”
Before I can interject anything, she says, “But later—after she got cancer—she was overwhelmed by guilt. She’s facing an early death and failure as a mother. Her son’s a disbarred lawyer, no prospects. She wants to leave him some security, give him the best life she can.”
“So she tells him Dad is his father?”
“Yep. But it’s not what she told Lincoln that’s important. It’s what she told Tom that matters.”
The heat of recognition flushes my skin.
“You know your father. Atticus Finch with a stethoscope. If Viola told him they’d had a son that she’d kept secret for forty years to protect your family—what would he do?”
“Whatever Viola asked him to.”
“Exactly! Tom probably called an attorney the next day to start setting up a trust fund for Lincoln.”
I have the feeling Caitlin’s scenario may be close to the truth. “None of that weakens my theory about Lincoln killing his mother. Both he and Dad would be acting in the belief that they were father and son.”
“I don’t pretend to know exactly how Viola died,” she says. Then she holds up her Treo. “But my money’s on the Double Eagles, under orders from Brody Royal.”
Caitlin seizes my wrist and looks hard into my eyes. “Penn, you’ve got to forget all this Gothic crap. We’ve got a recording of Brody’s daughter saying he committed murder, and Viola’s included in that. The only question is, what are we going to do with it?”