his case will go to trial.”
“Trial,” she said like a sick parrot. She closed her eyes, thinking how sordid it all sounded—and how disturbingly familiar. It was all coming back to her, hearing the same terminology peppering her parents’ conversations after the grand jury had indicted her father, her mother weeping drunkenly, her father professing his innocence—unconvincingly. And now it was starting all over again.
When she opened her eyes, Detective Terry was studying her intently. Upon closer inspection, his bloodshot eyes were hazel, almost golden, unusually pale with his dark coloring. And…dangerous. Unbidden, the thought darted through her mind that any woman foolish enough to hook up with this man was destined for disappointment.
Suddenly he leaned toward her. “Look, I didn’t know about the connection between your brother and your father when I made the arrest this morning. Your brother will have to pay for his crime, but…well, off the record, I should warn you—the D.A., Kelvin Lucas, is the same man who had your father indicted.”
A slow drip of panic entered her bloodstream, as cool as menthol. “Are you saying that the D.A. might be harder on my brother because he didn’t get to prosecute my father?”
The detective’s gaze was unflinching. “Ms. Wren, in this city, and especially in the D.A.’s office, your father’s name is like a bad smell. All I’m saying is that you and your brother should prepare yourselves for the worst.”
3
Wesley Wren whistled under his breath, a nameless tune that his father had always whistled when Wesley was a boy. He didn’t remember too many moments with his workaholic father, whose angular face was hazy in his mind, but he remembered that when Dad was in a good mood, he whistled. And, despite sitting in the corner of a musty jail cell and the fact that Hubert, one of the dozen other guys in holding, had forced him to trade his new brown suede Puma tennis shoes for Hubert’s worn-out no-name sneakers, Wesley was in a pretty good mood. It had taken him only a few weeks to find a way into the Atlanta courthouse records, and that wasn’t bad for a hobby hacker.
His buddy Chance had given him the idea by asking if Wesley could expunge a couple of DUI arrests from Chance’s record. He was willing to pay Wesley five hundred bucks per delete stroke.
Oh, sure, the extra cash had come in handy, but cleaning up Chance’s traffic violations hadn’t been the primary incentive. For months now he’d been covertly accumulating details about his father’s indictment and subsequent disappearance—covertly because Carlotta would murder him if she ever caught wind of it. He’d made copies of every public document he could find online and in crammed file cabinets around Atlanta, but the information was incomplete and dated. When he’d tapped into the courthouse records two days ago, he’d found a wealth of information on his father’s last court appearance, and on sightings of his parents over the past ten years—Michigan, Kentucky, California, Texas. The thought of his polished, executive father wearing a ten-gallon hat made him smile, but he was sure that Randolph Wren could carry it off. His father was smart, savvy, and knew how to blend in to his environment—how else had he been able to elude the authorities for over a decade?
His chest swelled with pride when he thought of his father donning a disguise and slipping out of town under the nose of some cop out to make a career for himself by capturing Randolph Wren, The Bird. When Wesley was in grade school, he’d entertained his friends with daring stories that he’d imagined to be true. Having a notorious father had given him status in school. He was no longer the bespectacled runt who blew the curve in math class. He was the son of The Bird. He had told his classmates how he’d helped his father escape the feds by coming up with a fantastic math equation regarding engine speed and the timing of traffic lights, and how he continued to help his father from afar via secret code. As soon as his father had gathered enough evidence to prove that he had been set up, he would return to Atlanta and clear his name. They would be a family again, vindicated, and stronger for their trials.
It was true…sort of. He hadn’t helped his father escape, of course, but he would have if his father had only asked. And there was no secret code within the abbreviated messages on the postcards they had received sporadically over the years—at least not one that he’d been able to crack. He’d spent hours poring over those postcards, eight of them in all, studying them under a magnifying glass, infrared light, black light, and had even managed to have a couple of them X-rayed on an eighth-grade field trip to a vet clinic. In hindsight, he realized there were no secret messages between the lines of “We’re fine and we love you” or “You’re always in our hearts,” yet he remained hopeful that his father would someday contact him and ask for his help now that Wesley was an adult.
Unless his parents had forgotten how old he was.
He banished the thought as soon as it entered his mind. Of course his parents knew he was an adult now. Just because they’d never called or sent a special message on his birthday didn’t mean that they’d forgotten that he was no longer a kid. Ditto for Christmas. They had sacrificed too much to risk being caught over something stupid and sentimental.
Yet every Christmas, in the back of his mind, he dared to hope that they might simply show up at his bedroom window, or maybe ring the doorbell. “We couldn’t stay away any longer,” they would say, then gather him and his sister in their arms.
But it never happened. Last Christmas he’d spent the day being a jerk to Carlotta when she’d only tried to make him happy by attempting to bake a chocolate cake with peanut butter chips in the middle. It had been his favorite since he was a kid, a special cake that his mother had always made during the holidays. But Carlotta was hopeless in the kitchen. In fact, self-preservation had forced him to take over the cooking duties when he’d turned twelve. Carlotta’s cake had been undercooked in the middle and burnt around the edges. He had snapped at her and at the time, had been unfazed by her wounded expression, just happy to lash out at someone.
But now he felt the sting of remorse over the mean things he’d said—that she’d never find a husband if she didn’t learn to cook and that he hated the clothes she’d bought and wrapped up for him and that he didn’t want to watch the dumb Christmas movie that she’d rented. The movie, he knew, had been her attempt to tether him, to keep him off the streets and away from the card tables. She meant well, but she smothered him.
Then he sighed. Damn, no matter what he did, he seemed to disappoint Carlotta. She’d be furious with him when she found out about the hacking. Although, if he was careful, he could at least keep her from finding out why he’d done it.
A buzzing noise sounded and the door to the holding cell slid open, revealing a uniformed officer. All the inmates who weren’t sleeping or passed out perked up.
“On your feet, Wren. You have a visitor.”
Wesley winced. Time to face the executioner. He pushed to his feet and waded through the jumble of funky-smelling bodies, enduring wolf whistles from his bigger, brawnier cellmates while the officer handcuffed him. Then he followed the officer to a room where his sister waited. Her anxious gaze darted from his face to his handcuffs, and she looked as if she was going to cry. God, he hoped not. Seeing her in tears tore him up, always had. When the officer left and closed the door, she gripped his shoulders hard, but instead of hugging him, she shook him with more strength than he’d known she had. “What the hell did you do, Wesley?”
When his eyes stopped spinning in his head, he said, “Relax, sis, no one was murdered.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yet. That Chance Hollander has something to do with this, doesn’t he?”
“No,” Wesley said because
