The Confessors' Club

SEVENTY-THREE

‘Tell me what happened up here, all of it, right now,’ Amanda said in a surprisingly strong voice. ‘In this, his last place.’

I let my hand fall away from the ignition switch. ‘He’s dead. One bullet.’

‘Who shot him?’

‘Canty. Delray was never a killer,’ I said, sure of that and most everything else, now.

‘From the beginning at Second Securities then, as best you see it.’

‘Canty must have driven Lamm down to Chicago to convert the Carson check to cash, and probably to help Lamm leave the country from there. Except Canty saw an opportunity to change his own life instead. He killed Lamm, stuffed him in the trunk of the Carson kill car along with the cash, and came back up here to erase the only other person who knew what he’d been up to.’

‘Wanda.’

‘Unfortunately for Canty, Richie Bales was up here by then, looking for Lamm. He surprised Canty, maybe as Canty was bailing the boat to take Wanda on her last ride, or maybe when Canty got back to the dock after disposing of her. Canty must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when Richie told him he wanted half the payout. Don’t forget, Canty still thought Richie was a cop, and saw him as one who could be bought off.’

‘So they drove down to Second Securities to split the money?’

‘Where, surprise, surprise, Canty saw the splintered door and the trashed car and thought the money had gone forever, and with it his hopes for getting out of the country a rich man. Richie, though, took a broader view.’

‘Meaning he saw how you could have learned through your insurance contracts that Second Securities was the Carson beneficiary, and gotten to the money ahead of them.’

‘And he saw how he could use your father to get that money back.’

‘All he had to do was lure my father up here to hold as hostage,’ she said.

‘I’ll bet checking your father’s phone records will show your father received a call from a burner phone just a few minutes before he left Lake Forest for work that Thursday morning. That would have been Richie, who your father still believed was a cop named Delray Delmar, telling him some of his and Arthur’s legal problems might go away if he’d come up to Bent Lake to talk to him and Arthur.’

‘Krantz had already frightened my father when he’d called for an appointment, threatening to prosecute him for Arthur’s crimes because my father owned half of Lamm’s agency.’

‘Between Krantz and Richie, it was enough to induce sudden panic in your father. He shot up to Bent Lake with no hesitation.’

‘When was my father killed?’

‘As soon as he arrived up here, according to the medical examiner’s timeline. They didn’t need to keep your father alive to lure me up here with the money.’

She looked out the window. ‘What could anyone have done?’ she asked.

It was the question I knew she would ask, and the one I most feared. I took a breath. ‘I wish I’d moved slower.’

She turned to look at me. ‘That Tuesday, Confessors’ Club day?’

‘No. The day before, Monday, when I’d been in such a rush to call Keller.’

‘You were in a panic; worried that Lamm would kill again the next night.’

‘I didn’t know Lamm was already dead, so I called Keller on Monday. On Tuesday morning, early, your father called me, furious. I got furious right back at him, saying he’d kept what he knew to himself for too long. He hung up on me before I could tell him that Delray Delmar was a fraud.’

‘Because if he’d known Richie was no cop, he never would have come up here?’

‘Yes.’

I waited for a moment and then for another, but there was nothing more to say. And so I started the engine and swung around to head back to Chicago.

Neither of us spoke the whole way down.