Page 154 of One of Us Is Guilty

She hit send.

She’d set a chain of events in motion.

Nothing could stop this now.

Patrick would show that message to his father. That’s what he always did when he was in trouble, run to his daddy.

And Daddy would try to save him.

She had been so focused on texting Patrick that she had become unaware of her surroundings, and was surprised when the driver pulled up at the station.

She paid him, in cash, got out and made her way to the main hall of the station.

There was a small line of people waiting at the Amtrak Baggage service, but it moved fast. In a matter of minutes, Vanessa was at the front of the line. The storage bill could have paid for rent for a month, but she didn’t care about the charges. Amtrak had manned bag services, for extra security.

She displayed the QR code on her phone, and the baggage handler scanned it, disappeared behind a service door, then came out of the back storage area with a black Nike gym bag with a white swoosh.

Vanessa thanked him, and took the bag to a corner of the main hall, away from the crowds pounding their feet over the tile. She knelt, opened the bag and checked its contents.

Everything was there, securely wrapped.

One item was the bracelet she had taken from Molly’s jewelry box, now sealed in a transparent ziplock bag. She placed it back inside, checked the rest of the bag.

She took one item from the bag, and held it close to her chest.

A red leather Valentino purse. Holding it close to her chin, she opened it, peered inside . . .

A small silver revolver lay cosseted in rich, dark, padded leather.

A .22 caliber revolver.

She snapped the purse closed, put it in her coat pocket, zipped closed the Nike bag and made for a train headed west.

In two weeks, it would all be over.

65

Vanessa

There is one law for the poor, and another for the rich.

Vanessa had come to understand this. But what she had never fully appreciated, not until these past two weeks, was that there was a third strand to that saying.

One law for the poor.

Another for the rich.

And no laws for the ultra-rich.

This was America. Maybe the rest of the world too.

While she had spent most of the two weeks following the trial moving around the mid-west, never staying in the same place twice, paying cash, just to be safe, she had also followed the news and fallout from the trial with forensic interest.

The prosecutor, Riley, had resigned from the district attorney’s office the day after the case had finished. Some reporters mentioned that he was being headhunted by several law firms. The judge was on bail facing federal charges. The FBI said in a press statement that, while their investigations continued, there was no evidence to tie any of the money received by the judge to a single individual.

But there was a link to Detective Larkin’s murder. The NYPD stated that he had been killed by a rogue former special forces operative, acting on his own, and probably suffering from PTSD.

One law for the poor.