First, Kill the Lawyers, page 19
“You wouldn’t have known where to look if I hadn’t told you, and I told you so we could post it on the internet, not use it to blackmail my family.”
“What difference does it make? You hate your family.”
Hayley clenched one fist, the other holding tight to the backpack. My left hand continued to rest on her shoulder. My right was touching the hem of my jacket.
“It makes a big difference,” she said.
“Give me the files.”
“Make me.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’re done here.”
“Hell we are,” Chad said.
He moved his hands too much for my comfort, so I filled mine with the Beretta. I pointed it at his face. I didn’t like shooting with one hand, a snap shot from the shoulder, but he was just seven feet away and I figured my chances were good.
Sean spread his hands wide.
“No, no, no,” he chanted. “No, no, no. No. No, no. Stop it.”
Chad froze in place. His eyes grew wide and fixed on the muzzle of the gun.
“I said we’re leaving,” I told them. “You got a problem with that?”
“Leave, then,” Sean said. “We don’t want any trouble.”
I turned my head just in time to see a red dot center on his chest.
I screamed, “Get down.”
Sean’s chest exploded.
There was very little noise. Just a kind of thud. Sean didn’t cry out. Neither did Chad.
I pushed Hayley down on the sidewalk and covered her body with mine.
Sean’s body fell backward against the concrete.
Chad stared down at him, a bewildered expression on his face.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Get down,” I told him.
He went to Sean and cradled him in his arms.
“What did you do?” he asked again.
I half pulled, half carried Hayley as quickly as I could, following the line of cars parked along the street until we reached mine. I didn’t look back, not even when I heard another thud followed by a loud, slow exhale.
We took cover behind the vehicle that was parked directly in front of my Camry. Hayley was breathing heavily, her shallow breaths infused with soft whimpers.
I holstered the Beretta and pulled the key fob from my pocket. I used it to unlock the car doors. I grabbed Hayley’s hand.
“Ready?” I asked.
She didn’t know what I was talking about.
I pulled Hayley to the rear door on the driver’s side, keeping to the street side of the Camry, using it as a shield. I opened the door and stuffed her inside.
“Stay down,” I told her.
I shut the door and opened the driver’s door and squeezed inside, keeping as low as possible while still being able to see over the steering wheel. At the same time, I glanced down the sidewalk. Chad was slumped over the body of his friend. Neither of them was moving.
I started the car, worked it out of the parking space, executed a tight U-turn, and accelerated hard down the street in the opposite direction from the sniper. At least I hoped it was in the opposite direction. Once again, I hadn’t seen him.
Why them? I wondered. Why did the sniper shoot Sean and Chad? Why didn’t he shoot us? He had tried to shoot us in the park, hadn’t he?
Hayley had rolled into a tight ball on the floor directly behind my seat. I couldn’t see her in the rearview mirror, so I glanced briefly over my shoulder. She was shaking like tall grass in a hard wind.
She kept asking herself, “What did I do, what did I do?”
I curled my hand behind the seat and tried to give her a reassuring pat but couldn’t reach. Hayley became quiet.
By then we were on the freeway, and I was trying hard to keep the speedometer at the posted limit. I wanted no dealings with the police. Yeah, I was a material witness to a homicide, and the Private Detective Board has rules about that sort of thing, only I didn’t want to explain what happened outside the Library until I was able to sort out Hayley’s involvement in it—unless the cops came knocking on my door and asked, of course, in which case I’d spill my guts. They might, too. The City of Mound has its share of traffic cameras like everyone else.
“We need to talk,” I said.
Hayley didn’t answer, and I didn’t press the point. All I wanted to do at the moment was get as far away from the Library as possible.
We drove without speaking until we were in Minneapolis. The bright freeway lights illuminated the inside of the car. Hayley stayed on the floor, but her head came up and she looked at me for the first time.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dr. Alexandra Campbell found us on her doorstep.
“Can we come in?” I asked.
She looked down at Hayley, at her piercings and tats and stringy hair and dirty clothes and backpack, and then she looked up at me with an appraising smile as if she had discovered something about my character that she hadn’t known before.
“Of course,” Alex said. She held the storm and inside doors open for us, and we passed into her house.
“Alex, this is Hayley O’Brien.”
Alex offered her hand and said, “How are you?”
Hayley’s response was to clutch the backpack to her chest.
“Hayley,” I said, “this is Dr. Campbell.”
“Are you a medical doctor?” Hayley asked.
“No,” Alex said.
“Oh.”
“When was the last time you had a hot meal?” Alex asked her.
“Five o’clock. Why does everybody think I’m homeless?”
Alex turned her eyes on me. All I could do was shrug.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Please. I’d love to hear it.”
“I’ll tell you later. For now—Alex, I need your help. We need your help. Hayley is in danger, and I need to hide her.”
“What kind of danger?”
“Mortal.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m standing right here,” Hayley said.
Alex and I turned to face her.
“I hate it when people talk as if I’m not in the room,” Hayley added.
“I apologize,” Alex said. “Are you in mortal danger?”
“I guess.”
“Why?”
“I’m trying to tell the truth.”
“That is dangerous. Please, take a seat.”
Hayley found a chair and sat with her backpack resting on her lap.
“Alex,” I said, “I’m hoping you can put her up for a few days while I try to sort it all out.”
“Why not take her to your place?”
“The police could knock on my door at any moment. Besides, she’s, you know, and I’m—”
“She’s a young woman and you’re a man? For goodness sake, Taylor. What a prude you are.”
Considering our relationship, I didn’t think that was a particularly accurate description, yet I refused to argue the point.
“What do you want to do?” Alex asked.
The question seemed to jolt Hayley. It was if no one had ever asked her opinion before.
“What?” she said. “Me?”
Alex squatted in front of Hayley and rested her hand on the girl’s knee. “Do you want to stay here for a few days?” she asked.
Hayley’s gaze flickered across the room without lingering on anything for very long until her eyes rested on Alex’s. “I don’t know you,” she said.
“I’m a schoolteacher.”
“Schoolteacher?”
“University of Minnesota. Are you in school?”
“No. I … I was enrolled at … I was supposed to start classes at UC Berkeley in August, but things happened.”
“If I’m not mistaken, they don’t start their spring semester until the second week of January.” Alex reached up and brushed a lock of hair out of Hayley’s eye. “Plenty of time to decide what to do.”
“Dr. Campbell?”
“Call me Alex.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You’re welcome to stay here, if that’s what you want.”
“You have no reason to help me.”
“You need help. What more reason do I require?”
“You could get in trouble.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Besides, that’s what we have Taylor for.”
Maybe it was the sound of her voice, or the look in her eye, or the slight smile on her lips, or even the way she caressed the girl’s knee with her hand, but something about Alex gave Hayley permission to let go. Tears flooded her eyes, and a long, low moan of anguish escaped from deep inside where it had been held prisoner by her rage. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Alex’s neck. Alex’s arms circled Hayley’s waist. The backpack slipped off the girl’s lap and thudded on the floor. They stayed that way, hugging each other while Hayley wept, for what seemed like a very long time.
While they hugged, Hayley began to tell us her story.
* * *
It came out in bits and pieces, a tale short on affection and long on neglect. Hayley had everything money could buy but none of the answers to the questions that constantly invaded her sleep. Why did her beloved father put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger? Why did her beloved mother marry a man old enough to be Hayley’s grandfather? Why did her stepfather treat her like a porcelain doll, something to be seen and not heard? Why did her stepbrothers and stepsister ignore her very existence except for those times when they berated her for being an ugly, ungrateful, and spoiled bitch? Why did her mother let them do it?
Why did every friendship end in sorrow?
Why had she ever been born?
“They forgot my fourteenth birthday,” Hayley said. “Even my mother forgot. They were all apologetic when they realized what had happened. I was given a lot of money. Toys. They also forgot my seventeenth birthday. I got a car that time. A BMW. My stepfather said the color matched my eyes. What color are my eyes, Taylor?”
“Light green.”
“What color is my car?”
“Dark blue.”
“They just want me to go away. All of them. Even my mother. They’d be happy to pay my bills, college tuition, rent, whatever I want, if I would just go away. Go to California. Oh, and stay out of trouble. At least the kind of trouble that gets into the media. It’s okay just as long as my name isn’t connected to the Guernsey name.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Alex said.
“I knew a girl in high school. She was caught drinking underage. Her parents grounded her, took away her car, her smartphone, her privileges. All she was allowed to do was go to school and come home for three months. She complained bitterly whenever I saw her. Said she hated her family. I would have given everything to have a family like that. I got piercings, I got tattoos even though it was illegal because I was under eighteen at the time, and no one cared. Except Melissa. She said I looked like a slut.”
“The computer hacks,” I said. “That was payback?”
“Have you ever done anything for revenge, Taylor?”
“Yes.”
“Sweet, isn’t it?”
“Actually, I found it to be very unsatisfying. A total waste of my time.”
“We’ll see.”
“Make me understand what you hope to accomplish.”
“Knowledge is power. Do you believe that, Taylor? Knowledge is power, but only if it’s one-sided. When secrets are revealed, power is lost or transferred to someone else. If the public finds out what despicable people the Guernseys are, they’ll lose their power over the rest of us. They’ll never survive it. Power is their beating heart.”
“Half of the hacks have nothing to do with the Guernseys.”
“Yes, they do.”
“I saw what the lawyers—”
“Lawyers? You believe lawyers?”
“I saw what they showed me.”
“Did they show you everything?”
“You tell me.”
Hayley slid off the chair and sat on the floor next to Alex. Alex took her hand in both of hers as Hayley spoke in a voice that made me think she had told her story many times, at least in her head.
The entire Guernsey family lived at Axis Mundi on Lake Minnetonka. Apparently it was the size of a resort. The members were expected to dine together each night, even Hayley. Servants would serve them the way they did in Downton Abbey. The old man wanted it that way. That’s what they called him behind his back, the old man. To his face it was Father or, in Hayley’s case, Stepfather, always reminding herself and everyone else of her place in the family hierarchy.
“My mother calls him Robert Paul,” Hayley said. “Nearly everyone else does, too. Never Robert. Never Bob. Always Robert Paul, both names together.”
During those dinners, conversations frequently veered to the family’s many business endeavors.
“The things they said,” Hayley told us. “They spoke effortlessly about bribing the mayor and defrauding the government like it was … like they were discussing the weather. Will we get our building permits? Will it rain? I would think, if only people could hear them. Then I thought, maybe they should.”
“So you hacked the computers of their lawyers,” I said.
“I didn’t. Sean did. He knew computers. I didn’t. I guess he made money stealing people’s identities.”
“How did you hook up with him?”
“I met him at the Library. He bought me coffee. Later, he took me to a bar and bought me a real drink.”
“Did he know you were underage?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t care, and neither did I. Then we fucked.”
She used the word for dramatic effect, yet the moment she spoke it, Hayley turned her head away. It was obvious that she didn’t give a damn what I thought of her, but I could tell she cared about Alex’s opinion. The older woman squeezed her hand tighter. Hayley found Alex’s eyes. I knew another crying jag was about to begin.
“They kept telling me I was a slut and then I decided I wasn’t but I was … and Sean—I just wanted someone to hold me. He was good to me, too. Treated me better than my own family until … Later, he shared me with his friends, and I let him.”
The tears fell. “Somehow I got it in my head that I could hurt my family by hurting myself.”
There wasn’t much talking after that. I left the room. Alex gave me a look that suggested I was being a jerk, but what was I supposed to do? Pat Hayley on the back and say, “There, there?”
When I returned, Alex was brushing the tears off Hayley’s cheek with her thumbs. She was smiling.
“We learn as we go,” Alex said, and I thought, isn’t that what I always say?
“You told Sean whose computers to hack,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Hayley replied. “Because of what was said at dinner I knew the names of the lawyers, of the law firms. “Sean—I knew he was just using me for sex. I decided to use him, use his skills at tracking computers and stealing identities. I told Sean I wanted to steal the information from the lawyers and put it up on the web, on NIMN. He thought that was funny. ’Course, he was already planning to betray me.”
“Why those lawyers? Why those cases?”
“You really don’t know, do you? It was because … Listen, the thing with Standout Investments. That wasn’t about violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Remember a couple years ago they caught Wells Fargo committing massive consumer fraud to make it seem like the bank was bigger, more successful than it really was, creating all those fraudulent accounts, forging customer signatures, sending out unwanted credit cards. There was a big scandal. The government fined them like one hundred and eighty-five million dollars. The bosses were dragged before a Senate subcommittee. Well, Minnesota River State Bank has been doing the exact same thing. The president of Wells Fargo said that every customer should have eight accounts whether they wanted them or not because ‘Eight Is Great.’ Stepfather wrote ‘Four or More’ in emails to his managers and directors. That’s what they’re trying to hide. Who cares about sending ads to people’s cell phones? Jesus. They were afraid that if they allowed the suit against Standout to go forward, all this other stuff would come out.
“The thing with Mayor Feeney—it was Robert Jr. who actually gave her the envelope filled with cash. Fifty thousand dollars. He gave it to the mayor personally and told her that if she cleared the poor people out of the neighborhood on the North Side where Ryan-Reed wanted to build its new plant, there would be more money where that came from, and the mayor wrote it all down verbatim. When Robert Jr. told us this at dinner, do you know what the old man said? He said Robert Jr. should have negotiated harder. He called him a pussy and said that if he was half as smart as him, Robert Jr. could have bought the mayor for ten or fifteen thousand less. That’s what I want the people to know.”
“What about the Dawn Peterson murder case?” I asked.
“Melissa was sleeping with Clark Peterson. She was Dawn’s friend. They went to school together. Somehow Lissa was introduced to Clark, and the next thing she was fucking his brains out behind Dawn’s back. When Dawn disappeared, Melissa was all ‘Is this my fault? Did Clark kill Dawn because of me?’ The old man, Stepfather, he was furious, kept calling Lissa a whore, which I guess she was, sleeping with another woman’s husband and all. The old man didn’t care that people might believe Melissa was somehow involved in Dawn’s disappearance, that she was in it with Peterson. Instead, he kept telling her that if his name—his name, not Melissa’s—he said if it came up at trial, if it was connected to the murder, she’d regret it big-time. If her name had been O’Brien instead of Guernsey, he wouldn’t have cared. Only the Guernsey name didn’t come up. I don’t know why. The defense lawyer knew Lissa was screwing Peterson because he questioned her about it. He came to Axis Mundi. I saw him. But the Guernsey name was never mentioned, Dawn’s body was never found, and Peterson got away with it. He got away with murder. It wasn’t the only one, either. Taylor, according to the notes we stole from his attorney, Peterson confessed that he had killed three or four other women over the years and hid their bodies where no one could find them just like he did with Dawn. He’s a fucking maniac.”
