“Do you know why?” Ajax asked, frowning.
“No.”
“He didn’t say anything about it?”
“Nothing. Not to me, anyway.”
“You worked with him for two years. What was he like as a lawyer?”
“I told you. Tough. Ambitious. He was the firm’s fixer. If a client had a problem, he made it go away. That was why he made partner so fast — two years before any other associate. But there was something different about this case.”
“What?”
“Well, for one thing, he tried to hand it off, rather than take it on himself. That was unusual. I heard him say the case was a loser and he wanted some other partner to take the first chair. I figured he was concerned that a big judgment against our client would hurt his reputation. But he couldn’t get out of it, because the mine insisted on him.”
“How was the case going?”
Ajax asked the question so smoothly that Penny answered without thinking.
“Hal — the senior associate — he’s pretty sure we’ll win if it goes to trial. He thought the depositions made the women look bad. Not sympathetic. Maybe he was right, but I’m not so sure. I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but their stories sounded pretty convincing to me. But Hal said our witness would offset whatever they claimed and make it sound like the women just wanted money.”
“Your witness?”
“A woman named Ruby,” Penny said.
Ajax got up from the chair quickly at the mention of his wife’s name. “Okay. Thanks. Penny, you’ve been a big help.”
Penny stood up, too. “You won’t tell anyone that I talked to you?”
Ajax put a finger over his lips and winked. “You’re an anonymous source. Just like Deep Throat. But hey, I could use your help on something else.”
“What?”
“People are bound to be talking about Gordon’s murder. You might hear things. Stories about Gordon, theories about what happened to him. If anything comes up that you think I should know about, you just call the sheriff’s office and ask to talk to Ajax. We can meet somewhere private. No one has to know. Okay?”
Penny nodded, biting her lip. “Yeah. Okay.”
Ajax and I left the motel together. We walked across the parking lot, but then I made an excuse to go back. “Hang on, I forgot my notebook.”
I jogged back across the parking lot. Penny answered the door, and I pointed at the dresser where I’d left my notepad. I nudged past her to retrieve it, but she didn’t move from the doorway. It was clear she wanted me gone.
I came up beside her again and spoke softly. “A monster?”
“It was a poor choice of words, that’s all.”
“I don’t think so, Penny. His son Jay called him the same thing. I was wondering if you talked to Jay one of the times you were in the house.”
“No, I didn’t.”
I waited, a clock ticking in my head. If we took much longer, Ajax would come back, and I didn’t think Penny would open up about any of this with a man. “Come on, it’s just you and me. What really happened?”
She hesitated. “Jay may have heard me talking to one of the paralegals.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m the one who called Gordon a monster,” she admitted. “It was me.”
“Why?”
Penny bit her lip and said nothing.
“Why did you say that?” I pressed her again.
She glanced at the parking lot, as if confirming that no one from the firm’s legal team was nearby. “We were going over deposition transcripts. Everyone else had left for the day. Daphne — she’s the paralegal — Daphne and I opened some wine. After a couple of glasses, she asked me about my first job interview with Gordon.”
“What about it?”
“She wanted to know if anything had happened between us.”
“Like what?”
Penny’s face soured. “Let’s just say my typing wasn’t the only skill he wanted to test.”
“He wanted you to sleep with him.”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
She nodded unhappily. “It was pretty clear I wasn’t getting the job if I didn’t, and I really wanted the job.”
“What about Daphne? Did the same thing happen to her?”
“Yeah. Her, too. Pretty much everyone, in fact.”
“Who knew about this?”
“At the firm? They all knew, but they didn’t care. Nobody lifted a finger to stop him. Gordon was a rainmaker. You don’t mess with the partner who brings in the business.”
“What about Erica?” I asked.
Penny shrugged. “She started out as his secretary, like me. You think her interview was any different? I already told you. Erica knew exactly who her husband was. That’s why she didn’t trust him.”
Chapter Ten
Over the course of the next several weeks, information came at us so fast that we could barely keep up with it.
Darrell, Ajax, and I conducted interviews around Black Wolf County. The other members of Gordon Brink’s legal team came back from the Christmas holiday, and we talked to all of them. The lawyers. The paralegals. The other legal secretary. They were more discreet than Penny Ramsey, but the picture they painted of Brink largely agreed with everything she’d told us. He was a tough, ambitious lawyer. He was obsessed with winning. And although none of the women used the same word that Penny had, I could see it in their eyes regardless.
He was a monster.
We talked to the plaintiffs, too. Not just the women, but their families and friends. Every interview gave us a new suspect, because they all hated Brink. He’d spent hours digging into the most intimate details of their sex lives. He’d exposed their affairs, abuse, incest, and abortions. He’d called them liars. He’d left them in tears. As far as the plaintiffs were concerned, Gordon Brink deserved to be cut up into little pieces, and whoever did it deserved a statue in the town square.
But nobody knew who’d actually killed him.
We checked every dumpster behind every business in town. We dug through the garbage in the county landfill, but we didn’t find the murder weapon or the killer’s bloody clothes. It’s not like the murderer could have buried them under the frozen ground or thrown them into an ice-covered lake, but as soon as the spring thaw arrived, they’d be gone forever. There’s a lot of land around here where people can make things disappear.
When we’d gathered all the evidence, we still had nothing. We had a body, we had motives, we had dozens of people who would have wanted the victim dead, but we didn’t have a single witness who could place anyone at Gordon Brink’s house on Sunday night. The only person who’d been there with him was Jay, and he still claimed to have not seen a thing.
It was the same situation Darrell had faced with the murders of Kip and Racer. No one really cared if Brink was dead. No one really cared if we put his killer behind bars. The town was ready to forget about this crime, to plow it under the snowdrifts and move on. Only Darrell still cared, because he was the kind of man who couldn’t leave a crossword puzzle unfinished. He had no intention of giving up. But even he knew the case was going nowhere.
By the time a full month had passed after the murder, we’d hit a wall. Evidence dried up. There was nobody left to talk to, no facts left to uncover. It was late January, and as the temperatures sank below zero, the investigation into the death of Gordon Brink turned as cold as the winter.
I assumed the case would stay that way forever. Unsolved.
So I had to face the other side of my life, sweetheart. The side that involved me and Ricky and our future. The beginning of the end for us came on movie night at the 126, and believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about whether to tell you any of this. But this isn’t just my story. It’s yours, and you deserve to know everything.