Shakedown

Chapter Sixty-three

It had always been my job to protect Wendy. I’d done that as long as she had let me. I cautioned her about strangers when she was little. I embarrassed her in front of her boyfriends when I asked them about their intentions. I called her to ask where she was and why she wasn’t home even if it was only midnight and she was over eighteen.

As the anger and bitterness she’d silently harbored percolated to the surface, she lashed out at Joy and me, then drifted away, experimenting with sex and drugs. I tried even harder then, tried to pull her back, tried to protect her from herself. When Wendy finally came back to us, I held her close but not too close, having learned from my mistakes.

When she graduated from college and got her own apartment, I advised her not to rent on the ground?oor or near the stairs since that made her a potential victim for burglars and rapists. I engraved her name below the serial number on her computer in case it was ever stolen. After Wendy started her job, I told her to be honest and fair and that she could be disappointed, but not surprised, when others failed to meet her standards.

I spoke the language of modern parents, encouraging her in her education and career, championing her independence. But in my heart of hearts, I was a throwback to my parents’ generation. I wanted her married, cared for, and safe, ambitions I kept to myself because she would have heard them as sexist, though I would have wished the same for her brother, had he lived.

Jill Rice’s last comment rang in my ears as I drove away. Her husband had put his assets in her name to protect her from him. I remembered my conversation with Colby outside Fortune Wok earlier in the week when he intimated that he and Wendy planned on getting married. Maybe he had protected Wendy in the same way Thomas Rice had protected his wife. Then a greater likelihood hit me.

There are some things a daughter will tell her mother only on the promise that the mother won’t tell the father. I was afraid I’d stumbled across one of them.

Joy had moved into an apartment on Tomahawk Creek Parkway in a Johnson County suburb called Leawood. The three-story buildings were red brick with bright yellow trim. A jogging trail wound through the complex. I found her walking the dogs, reining them in from their pursuit of the geese that?ocked to the pond at the edge of the complex.

Ruby saw me first and jerked hard enough on the leash that Joy lost her grip. I crouched in the grass, letting Ruby run to me and jump in my face, taking a swipe at my nose. Roxy dragged Joy to our reunion, the dogs climbing over one another for a shot at my chin.

“They could be sisters,” Joy said, pointing at the dogs as she picked up Ruby’s leash.

I scratched both of them behind the ears, stood, and studied my wife for signs of things she and Wendy had hidden from me. Joy gathered her end of the dogs’ leashes to her chest.

“You’ve got your Bureau face on, Jack. What is it? Have they found Wendy?”

“No, but I think she’s alive.”

Her arms fell to her sides. “Oh, thank God! What makes you think so?”

“I ran into Colby last night. He told me.”

“Colby? Where? How?”

“We were on the same playground.”

Joy balled her fists, a leash in each hand, the dogs lying patiently in the grass. “Damnit, Jack! I don’t have time for your games. We’re talking about our daughter. Tell me what’s going on!”

“I came here to ask you the same thing.”

Her face tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Colby went too far undercover and got involved with the people we were investigating. He stole money from these people and now he’s on the run. I caught up to him last night long enough to get the gist of things. He doesn’t know where Wendy is, but he thinks that she’s alive. He made it sound like she went along for the ride.”

“I can’t believe he would do something like that to Wendy.”

“Why? Because they’re married?”

Her jaw dropped. I could have knocked her over with a wave of my hand.

“How did you find out?”

“I didn’t until just now, at least not for certain. You remember that I copied the hard drive on Wendy’s computer onto the?ash drive you gave me. I looked through some of her files this morning. She owns an interest in a partnership that paid her over four hundred thousand dollars last year. It’s all on her tax return.”

“A partnership? What kind of partnership? I don’t believe it. She would have told me.”

“Why? Because she told you that she and Colby had gotten married?”

Joy crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head away. “Yes, because she told me. After all, I’m her mother.”

“And I’m her father.”

“Is that what this is about? That she told me and didn’t tell you? You’ve known since last night that she’s alive and you didn’t bother to tell me, and the only reason you’re telling me now is because you’re angry that Wendy didn’t tell you she’d gotten married.”

“You should have told me.”

“This isn’t about you or me, Jack. It’s about her. Wendy told Colby she wouldn’t marry him if he stayed at the Bureau, not after what had happened to us. He promised her he was getting out. That was good enough for her, but she didn’t want you to know they’d gotten married until after he resigned. She knew how protective you were and how you felt about Colby. She was afraid to tell you, afraid that you’d go ballistic and take it out on him.”

“I hope that’s true, but it doesn’t square with what I know. You should have told me. The fact that Wendy and Colby are married changes everything. It makes it look like she was a willing participant in whatever Colby was doing.”

“You can’t possibly believe that about your own daughter.”

My vocal cords twisted and froze when I tried to speak. Joy watched me, clutching her throat with one hand as if she felt my struggle. I tried to talk through my tremor-induced stutter, but that made it worse, forcing me to start and stop a couple of times before I could respond. When the words finally came out, they were choppy, like a dog’s bark.

“The facts are the only thing that matter, not what I believe. Wendy didn’t have money to invest in a partnership, not from legitimate sources. Neither did Colby. This partnership was probably used to launder drug money. The least bad explanation is that Colby convinced her the partnership was legitimate and told her that he was putting it in her name as proof that he intended to leave the Bureau.”

“If he had all that money last year, why didn’t he quit then?”

“Everybody in a deal has to bring something of value to the table. Colby worked undercover. He brought information to the table. If he quit his day job, he’d have nothing to offer his partners. I doubt they would have let him quit even if he wanted out.”

“You said Wendy is part of this. How do you know that?”

“Colby said as much. His partners are using Wendy as leverage to get back what he took from them.”

“But if Colby is on the run, he can’t be of any more use to them. And that means Wendy…” She collapsed to her knees without finishing her sentence, weeping and covering her face with her hands. “Oh my God, Jack! Not again!”