Compromising Positions Page 2

  “I’ll be in touch,” he managed, but doubted if she heard him.

  She was already gone, slamming the door hard behind her.

  Jesse tried hard over the next several hours to put the woman out of his mind. Even if it had proved possible, the thing with the Shokonnet baby lingered just below the surface like a dull, persistent toothache.

  It didn’t improve his mood any when Caro was not at the airport.

  Jesse looked around the empty gateway at Philadelphia International, then he crossed to a busier one on the opposite side of the concourse. He spoke with the woman at the desk there. No message awaited him. She suggested that he go back downstairs to ticketing and check there.

  He didn’t bother.

  He left the terminal, heading back to the parking garage with quick, aggravated strides. He’d wasted an hour and a half on this wild-goose chase, and that was the least of it. Caro had been coming into town for his sister’s wedding on Saturday. Jesse made it a point never to show up alone at any affair that any member of his family might be attending, his sister excluded.

  He knew even before he got home and played back his voice mail what had happened. Caro had, of course, changed her plans.

  As it turned out, she had headed off to Milan with some international race car driver. Her behavior was not a new phenomenon. The women he chose to associate with craved excitement. They started out believing that that excitement could be tapped from the vast Hadley fortune. Invariably, after a few months, they found out that whether he needed to or not, Jesse Hadley worked for a living. And he liked it.

  Still, Caro had lasted a little longer than most, and she was a moderately disappointing loss. “Damn it,” he muttered aloud.

  His mother would spend Saturday throwing at him every available, homely socialite she could get her hands on. And his father would hound his every step, wanting to talk about his mayoral candidacy. His sister often chided him for the way he dodged parental bullets, and he did not deny her insight. He showed up at the Hadley estate whenever a social occasion demanded it. He arrived early, so it could be said that he was also paying a family visit. And he always brought a date. The elder Hadleys were nothing if not socially proper. They wouldn’t corner him and harangue him in polite company.

  A politician needs a wife. You’re far too old to be running about this way. It’s paramount to your image that you settle down. No. don’t pursue that homeless issue. Let them kill each other over turf wars. They don’t vote. You have far more important issues to address if you’re going to run for mayor.

  Mayor, he reflected. Proof that they managed to catch him alone now and again. He would not be seeing out his next term as D.A. He would be reluctantly running for top dog.

  He was a Hadley.

  Jesse shrugged out of his suit coat and tossed it over the banister. He loosened his tie and went into the parlor. His favorite Waterford snifter was sitting on the right end of a polished sideboard beside a matching decanter. Wood was laid in the fireplace. more for its aesthetic value than for practicality since it was nearly June. Two Queen Anne chairs bracketed the hearth, and an antique fire screen sat behind the right one. There was a Cézanne above the mantel.

  It was Jesse’s favorite room, though not necessarily to relax and recline in—he rarely had time for that. He came here to let the elegance and beauty of it seep into his pores. It was neat, orderly and sane. As his life had been, for the most part, prior to about five o’clock this afternoon when an irate, not-very-orderly blonde had blasted into his office wearing too-bright flowers and horrendous shoes.

  He pored some cognac into the snifter, took a mouthful and let it settle on his tongue as he headed upstairs deep in thought. Only two people in the city of Philadelphia had the power to release a body involved in a criminal investigation. The cops couldn’t do it. The mayor couldn’t do it. The governor couldn’t do it. Hell, the Supreme Court couldn’t do it. Only the chief M.E. could authorize such a release when she was satisfied with the results. Or the district attorney could do it.

  Angela Byerly hadn’t signed that form. And he hadn’t, either. His stomach squeezed with the beginnings of real pain. He took another sip of brandy anyway.

  The release had been signed Jesse M. Hadley.

  In print, in the typed closing of all his letters and official documents—hell, even in the press—he used the initial. And someone had signed the release that way. The catch was, he never used the M in his actual signature.

  He filled the whirlpool bath and considered the possibilities. It could be that the Shokonnets had a friend inside the coroner’s or the D.A.’s office. God help him, that sort of thing had happened before, most notably in a case involving his own secretary and Tessa, his sister. But it didn’t quite feel right. Christian Benami—the man who had planted Jesse’s secretary in his office earlier this year—had been wealthy and powerful. Jesse hadn’t gotten the impression that that was the case with the Shokonnets. There were few people in Philadelphia—in the country—who were as wealthy and as powerful as the Hadleys. Jesse knew every one of them who even came close.

  What made a lot more sense was that someone was out to discredit him. As the D.A., he was an elected official. This was an election year. He would have to run again for district attorney—and win—so that he could leapfrog over to City Hall. The mayoral election wasn’t for another eighteen months, and his chances would be optimum if he were running from another elected position.

  He was a shoo-in for the D.A. spot. The Republicans hadn’t even officially announced their candidate yet, but none of the names that had been mentioned were particularly credible. It would take a lot more than a premature release from the morgue for any of them to gain ground on him.

  That left Angela Byerly. As she had pointed out, there were a good many people waiting, if not eager, to see her fall. But then, why not forge her name?

  Half an hour later, after a short spell in the bath, he returned downstairs to his study. He went back to work.

  “Eric,” he dictated to Eric Zollner, one of his investigators, “I need you to look into a couple named Harry and Melissa Shokonnet, and particularly their two children. One died of apparent SIDS—” he paused, thinking “—on Tuesday night, I believe. The older sibling died of SIDS, as well, but I don’t have a date on that one.” Jesse scowled. “We know that Family Services has received numerous calls regarding them. Check all the area hospitals to see if the kids were ever brought in for emergency treatment, and do a background check on the parents. See what you can get without a court order. I don’t want to alert anyone yet that I’m looking into this.”

  None of his subordinates would dare question his desire for secrecy on this, he thought. He was the D.A., and he was a Hadley.

  He pulled the tape out of the tiny recorder, labelled it, then dropped it into his open briefcase. He inserted another. “Jeanette, I need you to pull the personnel records on everyone in the M.E.’s office—anyone in that building, as a matter of fact, all the way down to the janitors.” He hesitated again, then clicked off, replacing that tape, as well.

  The last one he dictated to his secretary. Libby Dwyer. “I need your desk log for...say the past four weeks. I need to know of everyone who was in and out of my office during that time.” Not a likely route to the culprit, he considered. No one had seen his correspondence, or they would have known about the M. But someone had gotten their hands on one of those forms, either from his office or Angela Byerly’s.

  He finally sat back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head. He decided that he would personally look into the doctor’s background.

  She didn’t seem to like him much. Or, at least, she was unduly wary of him. He felt insulted, indignant and...well, alarmed. Because he couldn’t quite get that sparrow out of his mind.

  He wasn’t willing to dredge up the end of that memory, but he was alone now and it crept up on him. He had, of course, opened his hand again immediately after he’d caught it. Once he’
d recovered from his split second of shock, he’d instinctively let the bird fly. But it hadn’t. It had rolled out of his hand and fallen to the porch with a horrible little thud; dead as a doornail.

  His mother had been typically appalled and wouldn’t even discuss what had happened. But his nanny had said that it had a heart attack. Jesse had walked away from the experience learning something much more profound than mere biological science. He had felt that heart going wild before it had broken. And he knew then that capturing something that was meant to fly could kill it.

  He would never, ever have hurt that sparrow. But, of course, the sparrow hadn’t known it. The sparrow wouldn’t have believed it.

  He thought again of Angela Byerly’s legs and her multihued flowers. He wondered why she thought he might hurt her. He was still wondering about it hours later when he should have been dwelling on the traitorous, polished, undemanding Caro—whom he had not once ever glimpsed in turquoise shoes.

  Chapter 2

  By Saturday afternoon. Angela’s impulsive visit to Jesse Hadley’s office still made her heart squirm. She had been out of her mind.

  No, she hadn’t. She’d been angry, just as she had told him. And that was another mistake she’d made—admitting that her temper was the only thing in the world that could have goaded her into walking the two blocks between their offices and confronting him face-to-face.

  For nothing. Nothing had come of the meeting.

  Well, what had she expected? That he would admit he’d been wrong? And just as she had told him, there was nothing he could do about any of it anyway. Not now.

  Confronting him had been a stupid waste of time, and she was almost angrier with herself than she’d been with him. She was also a practical woman. Since it was over and done with, and there was no taking it back, she would have to put the whole scene out of her mind.

  Unfortunately, that was going to be easier said than done because John Gunner and Jesse’s sister, Tessa Hadley-Bryant, were getting married this afternoon.

  Angela hated weddings. She much preferred funerals. Not that she considered herself a morbid person, she thought, digging into a dresser drawer for a pair of hose. She celebrated life with her every breath—intentionally and doggedly balancing the ugliness of her job with brightness and clarity and hope. She understood death and worked with it in clinical terms, sorting through it to find clues no one else would understand. And she wore flowers and outrageous colors so that it wouldn’t permeate her world.

  Funerals and christenings, at least, were life events that deserved somber observation. Weddings were just the celebration of a passing stage. She might have enjoyed them for that alone, but people always tried to make more of them.

  She would go to this one because she sincerely hoped that it was a life event that would be joyous and permanent. She had been wary of John Gunner’s bride at first. Like her brother, Tessa Hadley-Bryant was upper-crust Philadelphia society down to her bones. But there was no denying that she loved John Gunner.

  So Angela would go to their wedding. In fact, she pretty much had to go. They were sending a car for her to minimize the chances of her weaseling out. John knew her well.

  He ought to, she reflected. They’d more or less grown up together before she’d gone to college, to law school and medical school, before she’d escaped this city with all its tortured memories, only to come back when it had hailed her as a prize acquisition and paid her accordingly.

  Ego. Pride. Those were the reasons she had come back in spite of everything that had happened here. The money they paid her was just part and parcel of that. She’d come back for the same reason she dressed the way she did. Out of a refusal to bow her head in shame, to hide her light under a bushel. To balance the ugliness with something that pleased her.

  “We really ought to be going, ma’am.” The deep male voice drifted up to her from the foyer downstairs. It was the limo driver. A limo, for God’s sake! Tessa had insisted. At least she would enter their lair in style.

  John had told her that she didn’t have to stay. Even a quick appearance would make him happy. He’d told her that it was time to bury the past. How could she explain, even to him, that there was still an irrational fear lurking inside beneath the bright colors and the pride?

  She finally found a pair of hose and sat down on the bed to pull them on. They were white. She moved to her closet Red, she decided. She would wear red. It was glaring, arrogant, there. It would counterbalance the quakes she felt inside. Unfortunately, everything red in her closet was too casual for a wedding. She began pushing through the hangers, glancing back over her shoulder at the digital clock on her nightstand.

  So far, so good. She was going to be at least half an hour late.

  She finally found a red linen dress that she thought would do the trick. It was plain, sleeveless, with a mock turtle neckline. It would go with the white hose if she wore pumps to match, and...yes, there it was, at the very top of her closet, a white hat with a wide brim and a huge, fake red carnation. But she didn’t own a pair of red pumps.

  She rushed through her makeup and took the towel off her head, running her fingers through her damp blond curls. She would open the limo windows, she determined. By the time they got to Independence National Historical Park, her hair would be passably dry. The wedding would be held at Christ Church there.

  She grabbed the hat and ran downstairs. The limo driver was waiting just inside her front door.

  “Your shoes, ma’am,” he said stoically.

  “We’re going to have to swing up Broad Street on our way.”

  Angela went to the front door, peering out to see how far away the limo was parked. She figured she could probably make it without ruining her hose.

  She sprinted out the front door and slid smoothly into the back seat. She pulled her left foot up onto her lap and nodded in satisfaction. No runs.

  “Ma’am,” the driver said as he settled himself behind the wheel.

  “Angela,” she corrected absently. “Ma’am makes me sound like a sixty-year-old dowager.” It made her sound like one of them—one of the Hadleys and Glowans and Prices who made up Philadelphia’s elite.

  “It’s four-forty...Angela.” She knew exactly what time it was. “We’ll be late if you want me to detour all the way over to Broad Street.”

  Even later, she thought. It was what she was counting on. “Well, it’s either that or I show up barefoot,” she returned placidly.

  The man put the car in gear and drove.

  The shoe shop Angela had noticed last week was still open. She gave the driver a fifty-dollar bill and pointed at the display window. “See that pair of pumps right there in the far corner? The red ones. I need them in a size seven.”

  “You want me to purchase these for you, ma‘am?’

  “Angela. And you’d better do it fast if you don’t want to be late for the wedding.”

  He got out of the car.

  With any luck, Angela thought, she would sneak in for the tail end of the ceremony, make a perfunctory appearance at the reception—just long enough that she wouldn’t be letting John down. Then she would leave, without encountering either of the men she had hoped to avoid. If she kept her time at this shindig to a minimum, it ought to be possible.

  Jesse Hadley was bad enough, and it was a sure bet that he would be at his sister’s wedding. One short week ago, he would have looked right through her, never even realizing who she was. She had pretty much ruined any chance of that happening now. Still, it wasn’t Jesse she dreaded encountering.

  Her palms were beginning to sweat. She looked around for a napkin or tissue.

  She wondered if Wendell Glowan would remember her. Probably not.

  Charles Price III would. And he traveled in Hadley circles. Of course. John wouldn’t have insisted she come if there was any chance Charlie might turn up. She couldn’t believe he’d do that to her.

  “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust someone,” she whispered aloud.
And John Gunner was as safe a bet as anyone.

  Angela leaned closer to the window and combed her fingers through her hair as the driver came back. Her stomach was rolling now.

  Vows were exchanged. Tessa beamed. Gunner looked a little bemused.

  Jesse turned to follow them up the aisle, and he felt a little dazed himself as he scanned the mismatched bunch who had gathered in the church. The left pews were filled with classic hats, sleek hairdos, somber suits and gloves—the Hadley side. Of the immediate family, only Jesse’s father had not gone into politics. He was the senior partner of Hadley, Glowan and Russ, the foremost law firm in Philadelphia. Jesse’s mother was a Glowan. Her sister had married a Russ.

  Wendell Glowan, his uncle, was a superior court judge who had just been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Various cousins sat in the U.S. Senate and in Congress, and at least one of them was probably going to run for the presidency in a few more years. Jesse’s grandfather, Marshall Hadley, had once been the governor of Pennsylvania. He’d passed away years ago, but Diantha, his widow, was very much in attendance today and holding court in one of the front pews.

  If the Gunners were impressed, it didn’t show.

  The pews on the right were awash with splashes of color. It all reminded him of the dress Angela Byerly had worn on Thursday. He was having a surprisingly hard time getting the woman out of his mind. He found himself remembering jarring flashes of her at odd moments—those turquoise shoes, all that hair. Eyes that changed color.

  She was the only other human being who was even marginally aware of the significance of that release form. He supposed that was as good a reason as any to dwell on her from time to time, but he wasn’t pleased that it was her physical appearance that came most readily to mind.

  The Gunner clan called out happily to each other from the back pews to the front now that the ceremony was over. A little boy attempted to climb over one of the seats and he fell, smacking his head against the back of the next one.