Scarlett had to steady her breathing. How had she not known about this brother?
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. Mikhail was not the first child Marcus’s mother had lost to violence. She’d lost Matthias nearly twenty-five years before. ‘That poor woman.’
The next article, from the same Lexington paper, was dated a few days earlier, its headline making her racing heart stop short. ‘GARGANO BOYS HOME SAFE’.
‘Oh no. No, no, no.’ Her stomach twisting into a vicious knot, she read on. The three boys had been kidnapped in a well-orchestrated operation, taken from different places but at the same time. Marcus and Montgomery had been grabbed on their way home from prep school.
Montgomery? That must be Stone, she thought.
The family’s chauffeur had been overpowered, drugged, then ejected from the car. The two boys had been drugged and carried to an abandoned warehouse. Three-year-old Matthias had been taken from his bed during his nap by someone posing as one of a construction crew that had been hired to do repairs on the family’s penthouse.
A ransom of five million dollars had been demanded. Scarlett’s mind spun both at the amount and that Marcus’s parents had been able to produce it in less than twenty-four hours. Disaster had struck, though, when the kidnappers realized the FBI and Lexington PD were on to them. The family had been warned not to involve the authorities, but the boys’ mother had done so. The furious – and panicked – kidnappers shot at all the boys, hitting two, but their third shot missed the oldest.
Marcus. He’d been kidnapped and shot at. Shot at. My God. How many times have people tried to kill him? she wondered, horrified. And he’d only been eight years old.
Eight. That was how old he’d been when his mother was hospitalized after overdosing on pills. Scarlett hated suicide because she was left with the unpleasant task of informing the next of kin and she never had answers for their gut-wrenching questions. But that didn’t mean she didn’t understand it. She’d even contemplated it herself once or twice after Michelle’s death. But Della Yarborough had had two boys left, one of whom had been critically injured. Her boys had needed her. Marcus had needed his mother.
‘Oh,’ she breathed. That was why Gayle was so special to Marcus. She’d been his nanny during this time. So much made sense now, all the way down to Marcus’s protection of Stone.
A car horn blared outside her window and Scarlett suddenly became aware of the time. She was now well and truly late. Pulling back into traffic, she fought to clear her mind.
Whatever Marcus was holding inside had to do with this kidnapping, although nothing she’d read seemed like it would have involved a sin on his part. He’d only been eight, after all. How bad a thing could an eight-year-old do?
None of this had to do with Tala, either, she told herself sternly.
But it had everything to do with Marcus, so while it wasn’t the most important thing on her plate, it was important to her. She wanted to understand. Desperately wanted to help. She rolled her eyes at herself. She wanted to fix him.
She’d get that chance if she had to tie him to a chair and make him talk to her.
But for now she had to focus on her job, which was to find Tala’s killer.
Twenty-one
Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday 4 August, 7.30 P.M.
‘You had twenty-eight callers while you were gone,’ Gayle informed him archly as he tore past her desk, practically running to his office. ‘Marcus!’ she snapped. ‘Stop.’
He slowed his pace, stopping with his hand on the handle of his office door. ‘I heard you, Gayle. Twenty-eight calls.’
‘No. Twenty-eight callers. Half of them called more than once. Most were not polite. Most called to comment on the story Stone uploaded this morning. You remember,’ she said sarcastically, ‘the one where you were unable to save a seventeen-year-old girl you met in an alley. Some of the callers were our advertisers, many of whom wanted to know what the hell you were doing in an alley to begin with. Some threatened to pull their ads. I had to grovel, Marcus.’ She sat back, arms folded across her chest. ‘You do not pay me enough for this.’
He managed to smile at her. ‘You’re right. Give yourself a raise.’
‘Do not smile at me. Do not try to charm me. You always sucked at it.’
He lost the fake smile, staring at her numbly. ‘Then what do you want?’
Gayle stood up, frowning. ‘What did that woman do to you?’
‘Which woman?’
‘That damn detective. She drops you off here and drives away with you looking like you saw a ghost. And . . .’ Her eyes widened. ‘Is that a bandage on your head? What happened?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m tired, Gayle. I don’t want to go over it again. I’ve written the story already.’ He’d done so while sitting with Isenberg. It wasn’t long, and he’d need Stone to punch it up, but it had all the relevant facts. ‘I’ll email it to you. Where is Stone?’
‘Your brother’s in his office.’ Gayle frowned in disapproval. ‘Drinking heavily.’
Marcus wasn’t sure if her disapproval was directed at him or at Stone. ‘Why?’
‘He says you’ve turned him into a babysitter. He dropped Jill off at the university, then came back here, took a bottle of Lagavulin from your desk drawer and went to his own office.’
‘Wonderful,’ Marcus muttered. ‘First Mom, now Stone.’
Gayle’s expression instantly softened. ‘Whoa,’ she said. ‘Your brother and your mother . . . two different things. You don’t need to worry about him so much, Marcus.’
‘I should save it all for Mom?’ he asked darkly, then shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take my bad temper out on you. I’ll talk to you later.’
He went into his office and shut his door. A glance at the security monitor showed an empty space where Scarlett’s car had been. She was gone, off to the FBI field office to meet with her partner, a good man who’d probably never killed anyone. Outside the line of duty anyway.
His chair groaned when he dropped into it. What the fuck am I going to tell her?
The truth. He had to tell her the truth. And hope for the best.
Wearily he picked up the phone and called Stone’s office, relieved when his brother didn’t sound drunk. ‘Can you come see me?’ Marcus asked. ‘It’s important.’
‘You’re not going to need another Kevlar vest, are you?’ Stone asked ominously.
‘No. The spare is still good.’ He hung up, started his computer and Googled ‘Michelle’, ‘murder’ and ‘Trent Bracken’.
He sighed as hit after hit was returned. Michelle Schmidt’s brutalized body found in an alley behind a dumpster, just as Scarlett had said. Trent Bracken, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, was arrested for the crime when it was shown that the victim had identified him as her abuser in her last text, sent to her best friend.
‘Criminal justice major Scarlett Bishop,’ Marcus read aloud. There were no photos of Scarlett in the articles he found, although one report described her as ‘in shock’ at the scene.
‘I wonder why,’ he muttered. Because it was easier to dwell on Scarlett’s trauma than his own, he picked up the phone and dialed Cal. As the editor-in-chief, Cal would know exactly where to find the information in the archives, although most of that information was also tucked away in his brain. ‘Who was covering the city’s crime beat ten years ago?’
‘Jeb was. Why?’
‘Shit.’ Jeb had died a year ago. ‘I wanted to find some articles in the archives.’
‘I can search for them, or ask Jill to do it.’
‘No,’ Marcus said firmly. He didn’t want Jill in his business until he was sure she wasn’t planning to do something stupid – like turn his team in because of the laws they routinely bent investigating child abusers and wife beaters. He especially didn’t want her in Scarlett’s business. ‘Do you remember a murder that happened at the university, a woman named Michelle Schmidt?’