“They had a price, of course,” he said. “For Artie, it was protection for both families until it was all over. We had round-the-clock surveillance on you and your little one in that apartment where you lived, plus your kids at college, and all the Wylies up in New York.”
Her jaw loosened. Round-the-clock protection? And she never knew?
“Roger’s price was, well, of course, a shortened sentence. That’s just a normal plea bargain. But since everything he hadwent to the government, he insisted this property be safe, put in your name, and could never be taken away. We worked out a deal with his attorney, who then ran this as a nice little rental business for you.”
She thought of John Waverly, the lawyer who’d helped her, and made her think he was brilliant for finding a way for her to keep the house. All the while…
James glanced around and chuckled. “Then we made up that whole ‘you can sell the house in thirty years’ thing because that attorney died and it was too complicated to bring in a new guy. We planted that ‘loophole’ for him to find. Anyway, it’s yours. And you can sell it, or keep it. Whatever. Roger set you and your kids up for life.” He nodded, looking impressed. “Very shrewd deal on his end, I would say.”
She tried to agree, but the cascade of love and pride and gratitude made it impossible to speak.
“’Course, it sure wasn’t the plan for him to die in jail,” James added solemnly. “Roger was scheduled to be sprung on January first. He passed, as you know, in November.”
“Oh.” The sound escaped her lips like a groan of true pain.
So close. They’d been socloseto freedom and happiness.
Suddenly, she was glad she didn’t know that all these years—grateful she hadn’t had three decades to stew over the fact that if he’d lived six more weeks, they could have shared another night and maybe more.
“’Course, during his time in prison, we didn’t want any contact between the families,” James said. “No connection that could lead Cotton to you or the Wylies.”
She pressed her fingers to her lips, that decades-old promise finally,finallymaking sense. “So both men made Jo Ellen and me promise to never speak to each other.”
He nodded. “Not until Roger was out of prison and Cotton was in. I gotta say the real savior in all this was Artie Wylie,” hetold her. “He put his life on the line for this case. More than any decorated FBI agent, if I’m being frank. He knew what mattered, and it wasn’t getting Roger out early. It was the kids. You, his wife, his daughters, and your kids. That’s all that mattered to Artie. He was willing to risk his life to make sure Cotton Ramsey didn’t lay a hand on any of you. Because, trust me, that evil rat would have happily killed you all in your sleep to get back at Roger.”
She stared at him in horror. “Is he and are his men…gone?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Oh, yeah. All gone. No worries there. And I’m long retired.” He ran his hand through his hair as if every white strand was a result of his lifetime of work.
“Then I heard through the grapevine that this Peter McCarthy was sniffing around,” he continued. “So, I took a chance coming here, hoping that you might have found the one thing we need to completely close the case.”
“The dry cleaning stub,” she guessed.
He nodded. “You got it?”
Maggie hesitated, then sat up and reached into her pocket, pulling out the ticket. “We discovered it in a safe deposit box in Destin,” she said. “It says it’s for a suit.”
“It is. That cleaner was a front for the FBI, though, not a starch and fold. And I know why Artie kept this stub.” He flipped it a few times, smiling. “Proof if he ever needed it.”
“How so?” she asked.
He pointed to the faint six-digit number printed along the bottom. “This,” he said, voice softer now, “is the retrieval code to the evidence locker where we stored the wired suit Artie wore the night we got Cotton.”
Her breath caught.
“That wire has Cotton’s confession, the threats to your family, even a list of offshore accounts he used for laundering.It’s all on that recording. And the only copy—outside the one I filed under sealed evidence—was tagged to this.”
“No wonder it had been stashed in a safe deposit box,” Maggie said.
“Yup.” He flicked the stub with his finger. “This was Artie’s insurance policy. If anyone in Cotton’s family or circle ever came after him, he’d have this, even if everyone who worked on the case died. Especially since Roger was gone and he had no one to back up his story.”
Maggie curled her fingers around the arms of the chair, letting it all sink in.
“I assure you that won’t happen,” he said. “But I want to retrieve the recording. Decommission the locker. Close the last file on my desk that still has his name on it. And give you the ending Artie and your husband never got.”
She blinked hard, her voice barely audible. “You really mean it? They were…heroes?”
“Not perfect men,” James said, “but they loved their families and wanted to protect them.”
