Hadley & Grace(42)

“Assuming you knew nothing about what your husband was doing.”

She shakes her head again and cries harder. “I didn’t. I hate drugs. Frank knows that. I can’t believe he . . .” She hiccups, and her voice gets swallowed by her emotions.

“Okay,” he says gently. “I believe you. Then, yes, you would have been free to go.”

She squeezes her stomach tighter, rocks back and forth. “But now, because I did what I did, Grace and I are going to go to jail?”

Prison, he thinks, but he doesn’t correct her. Kidnapping a federal officer, firing a deadly weapon during the act, hijacking his car—even with extenuating circumstances, these are serious charges that will draw hard time. He thinks of Herrick’s baby gumming a smile at him in the car, of the little boy who loves Hank Aaron and was upset over losing his baseball uniform, of the girl who took sailing lessons last year, where she learned how to tie knots, and his guilt stabs him, knowing had he just waited for backup or gone to the field office first, none of this would have happened.

“Hadley,” he says.

She shakes her head like she doesn’t want to hear any more.

“How well do you know Grace?” he says carefully.

She doesn’t answer, but he can tell by how quiet she is that she is listening.

“Did you know she has a record?”

Her head is bent so far forward he can’t see her face, but he hears the small catch of her breath. She had no idea about Herrick’s past. He feels terrible for what he is doing, but it might be his only shot at turning this around.

“How’d the two of you pair up?” he says.

More rocking and a full beat of silence; then finally she answers, “We didn’t. Grace just happened to show up when I was trying to find the money. I didn’t know where the safe was, and she did, so I told her I would split the money with her if she showed me.”

“She just happened to be there?” Mark says, not buying it for a second. He has never been a big believer in coincidences, and the likelihood of the two of them accidentally showing up at Frank’s business at the exact same time is too impossible to be true.

Sensing his doubt, Hadley adds, “She thought the uniform delivery had been shorted, and she wanted to check it.”

“On a Friday night?”

“She was a really good employee. And she said the baby had been crying, and driving with him was a way to calm him down.”

Torelli’s face is entirely earnest, but he still doesn’t trust it. “So, you offered her half?”

“I had no idea it was going to turn out to be so much.”

“How much was it?” he asks, as if he has no idea. By Fitz’s estimation, Frank was pulling in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand a month from his side racket, and the operation, as far as they could tell, had been running for a couple of years. So Fitz figured he had close to two million, give or take.

The slightest hesitation, her eyes flicking up and to the right before settling back on his. “Around nine hundred grand,” she says.

He reveals nothing and says in a steady voice, “That’s a lot of money.”

She nods. Looks back at her hands.

“Weren’t you worried Frank would come after you?”

“Of course,” she says. “That’s why I ran at the hospital. I did think those guys worked for Frank.”

She looks small and defeated, and he feels terrible for her. In his line of work, he’s seen a lot, and unfortunately nothing matches the cruelty of those closest to their victims.

She sniffles, wipes the tears from her face, then hugs her arms around herself as if she is cold, though the trailer is impossibly warm.

She is right to be scared. Mark has watched Frank Torelli for a year. The man is ruthless, erratic, and mean, and there’s no way a man like him is going to let his wife waltz away with a million dollars of his money, along with his daughter, and not come after her.

“Which is the other reason,” he says, “why you need to let me help you. Frank is dangerous, and you and Grace are in trouble—”

“Stop,” she croaks, clearly on the brink of losing it.

So he does. He clamps his mouth shut around the next words he was going to say, unable to take the distress he’s causing.

For a long time, they remain silent, his heart heavy and his mind spinning as he tries to figure a way out of this, for him and for them. Finally, he says, “How’d you end up hurt?”

“I tripped over the toilet lid that had been concealing the safe.”

“The safe was inside the toilet?”

“The tank.”

He nods. He’s seen a lot of creative hiding places for safes but never a toilet.

“And Grace knew where it was and had the combination?”

“No. I had the combination.”

Does he detect another lie? It’s impossible to tell. He thinks it through. Torelli goes to the office to pilfer money for her escape. She searches for it but has no idea where it is. Then, by some wild coincidence, Herrick shows up and just happens to know where the safe is, but without Torelli, she can’t open it because she doesn’t have the combination.

Not a chance. Coincidences like that just don’t happen in real life.

Torelli continues, “I stepped back, and my heel caught on it, and my ankle twisted when I fell.”