Angie shocked herself by impulsively leaning down and giving the judge a quick hug and planting a kiss on her damp, lined cheek. She left the judge facing the water, her arthritic hands gripping her walking sticks as she stared into the nebulous gray distance.
As Angie hurried along the beach, her hands thrust deep in her pockets against the cold, with the wintery salt wind raw against her face, she considered once more the irony—how media exposure, her notoriety, had tanked both her policing career and her PI job. Yet the media exposure had brought her Justice Monaghan and a tool to seize it all back. But better. Stronger. She would no longer hide from being Angie Pallorino, the cradle baby, the violent cop who’d shot and killed a sick murderer. She’d be all that and more. She’d carry on marching to her own loud drum, and she’d hold her banner high in the name of truth. And closure. For others like herself and like Jilly Monaghan.
Once Angie reached her car, she called Jock Brixton.
His line was busy, so she left a message. “Jock, it’s a wrap. You’ll find the balance of the Gulati case fee plus a bonus, minus my cut and expenses, in the Coastal Investigations account by close of business Monday. Job’s done.” She smiled to herself. “A copy of my report will be on your desk in a few days.”
She killed the call and sat back, watching the rain wriggle down her Mini Cooper windshield.
Fuckit. She’d won. She’d done it. Her first solo PI case.
Angie started her engine. It had taken the full afternoon yesterday to sort things out with the RCMP. She’d then gone home, showered, and crashed. She’d slept in this morning and then come to see Jilly Monaghan to break the news in person. Next on her agenda was Maddocks. She wanted to see him in person, too.
As she drove she rehearsed in her mind how she’d tell him she was ready. To commit. How she’d ask if he still wanted this—her.
She turned down a street wet with rain and plastered with dead leaves. Slippery leaves. Slippery like those rocks on the river where Jasmine had slipped ... Something began to niggle in her brain about the Gulati case, something someone had said about her slipping ... but she couldn’t pin it down.
Suddenly, up ahead, she saw the gates of the Mount Saint Agnes Mental Health Treatment Facility. Angie checked the time. Saturday noon. Her dad would be there visiting her mom. He always went on Friday evening and again on Saturday around noon. He’d stay for lunch in the patients’ dining room. Angie quickly tapped her brakes and clicked on her indicator. She drove through the massive wrought-iron gates of the Mount Saint Agnes compound.
Angie found Miriam and Joseph Pallorino sitting alone in the glassed-in sunroom. It was darkening outside with lowering clouds, rain flecking against the windows, but logs crackled in a cast-iron fireplace in the corner, making the place warm.
Her father glanced up as she entered. Surprise shot across his face at the sight of her. It was replaced with worry as he came abruptly to his feet, then winced, his hand going to his hip.
“Angie? You—you okay? You look—”
“Exhausted. I know.” She smiled and hugged him. “I’m tired but really good. How about you? That hip still hurting, huh?”
He made a face. “Yeah. Same old. Cricks and creaks. This getting-old business is not for sissies, but it’s better than the alternative, eh?”
“I guess.” She glanced at her mother, who was staring vacantly at her own reflection on the glass pane. “How’s Mom?” she said quietly.
“She’s okay today. You picked a good afternoon to visit, I think. She might recognize you.”
Angie pulled up a wicker chair and sat facing Miriam Pallorino. Her adoptive mom was a faded echo of what she’d once been, her eyes vacant, her face sagging, her once flame-red hair now blending with white to create a clownish pale-orange cloud around her features.
Angie’s heart crunched.
Miriam and Joseph Pallorino had kept Angie’s past a secret from her. They’d inserted her as a four-year-old into their dead daughter’s life, even giving her the same name. But it had been motivated by loss, a desperate act of grief. It was inspired by love in so many complex ways.
Was the motivation behind the Pallorino family secret that much different from those secrets so fiercely guarded by the Tollets, the Carmanaghs, and the Jacobis in protecting Axel Tollet—one of their own?
A whisper of unease darkened Angie’s mood as her mind returned to the Tollet and Carmanagh gang. And to the truck that had tried to run her off the road and the arrows fired at her and Claire in the grove.
If it was them who’d done those things, it had likely been an attempt to scare her away from digging up the truth about Porter Bates’s murder.
Still, the disquiet lingered, that sense that something was off, unfinished. That she’d missed a critical piece of evidence, and it dangled somewhere in her brain, just out of reach.
She pushed the unease away and focused on why she’d come, on the good things she wanted to nurture in her life now. Reaching out, she took her mother’s cold, veined hands in her own.
“Hey, Mom. How are you doing? You been watching the birds out there today? Are they happy with the new feeder I brought last time?”
Confusion chased across Miriam’s features, and consternation furrowed into her brow. She shot a desperate look at her husband.
“It’s Angie, love,” he said. “Our Angie.”
Miriam began to rock her chair. “Angie,” she said, the frown deepening across her brow. “Angie. Angie. Who’s Angie?”
Angie took out her phone. “I wanted to show you something, Mom.” She clicked open an image that Ginny had shot with her phone of Angie in the bridal gown. She held the phone out to her mother.
