Promise Not To Tell(23)

“I don’t know why he wanted your mother in his cult, but I know exactly why he wanted to control my mother,” Cabot said. “She was a trust-fund baby. Her father disowned her when she ran off with my father, but the old man couldn’t prevent her from accessing her trust fund.”

“What happened to your father?”

“He was killed in a car crash.”

“Like the man who gave Zane the Wallerton house? I’m starting to see a pattern here.”

“Oh, yeah. What happened to your father?”

“Killed in a car that was rigged to explode,” Virginia said. “They never caught the person who planted the bomb on the vehicle. The authorities decided Dad must have had mob connections. It was ridiculous. He was an artist.”

“Turns out there were a lot of convenient deaths around the time Zane was setting up in the cult business.”

“No wonder he decided to move out of the Pacific Northwest.” Virginia thought for a moment. “Did Zane manage to blow through your mother’s fortune? Was he finished with her? Do you think that’s why he murdered her?”

“No, he killed her well before he had exhausted her trust fund. And before you ask, no, due to some technicality in the way the fund was set up, I was never included in the trust. My grandfather couldn’t stop my mother from accessing her inheritance, but he did manage to tie things up in such a way that I never got a dime.”

“That’s harsh.”

“The old man was thoroughly pissed because Mom ran off with a man he disapproved of.”

“Did you ever meet your grandfather?” Virginia asked.

“No.”

“You mean your family let you go into the foster care system rather than forgive your mom for running off with the wrong man?”

“Up until his death a couple of months ago, my grandfather controlled the Kennington family with what people like to call an iron fist,” Cabot said. “Anyone who wanted to keep his or her share of the inheritance had to toe the line.”

“A real control freak.”

“Yeah. But I got lucky.”

Virginia smiled. “Anson Salinas.”

“Right.” There was a short pause before Cabot spoke again. “As I told you, Whittaker Kennington died recently.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t go to the funeral.”

“No, but evidently he left me a bequest in his will.”

“So he had a change of heart there at the end?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it,” Cabot said. “I think it’s more likely that his first wife – my grandmother – left the bequest to me before she died. Maybe something the old man couldn’t touch. Who knows? It’s not a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Still, twenty-five grand is twenty-five grand.”

“True. It will buy some upgrades for our computer system. I’ll find out the details soon enough. I’ve got an appointment with a Kennington family lawyer. But let’s get back to the real question here. I know why Zane found my mother useful.”

“Her trust fund.”

“Right. Do you have any idea why he might have recruited your mother?”

Virginia turned that over in her head for a moment.

“I’ve never asked the question from that point of view,” she said. “I’ve often wondered why my mother joined the cult, but I’ve never thought about why Zane lured her into his web.”

“You were just a kid, but what do you remember about the situation?”

“My mother fell in love with an artist. She got pregnant and dropped out of college. They eloped. Her parents were furious. There was a huge quarrel. Things were very strained between my parents and my grandparents after that. And then my father was killed and Mom somehow fell under Zane’s influence. She never explained why.”

“You grandparents must have been shocked.”

“Horrified is more like it. They were both college professors, you see. They moved in serious academic circles. The fact that their daughter had gotten sucked into a cult was not only emotionally devastating for them, it was also enormously embarrassing.”

“You said your mother didn’t have much money, but maybe your father had a life insurance policy that was worth a lot of cash,” Cabot suggested.

“No, I’m sure there was no insurance money. Mom was smart – my grandmother always says she could have had a brilliant career as a mathematician – but she certainly didn’t have access to a fortune.”

“Did your mother work?”

“Of course. I told you, my dad was an artist. He never did make any money.”

“What did your mother do?”

“She became a bookkeeper. Why?”

“Zane’s scam was, in essence, an old-fashioned pyramid scheme,” Cabot said. “One of those operations that depends on a lot of people at the bottom sending money up the chain to the people at the top.”

“The people at the bottom never get rich but the guy at the top does. All right, so that explains the business model. Go on.”

“Zane would have needed the basic infrastructure that any successful scam or legitimate business requires, including someone who could handle the money that poured in.”