Page 110 of The Secrets We Hide
“Bernadette will know. Like I said, they were thick as thieves.”
“Okay.” Emmy glanced down at her phone. She was probably adding it up. He’d named six jurors so far, plus the Pushy Fella. That left four more names excluding his own. “Anyone else?”
“Yes.” Louis snapped his fingers. “Mitch Bellingham. Now he was always an ornery cuss, especially during the trial. The very last holdout. He was a vet like me, a true patriot, though I was Air Force and he was Army, so there was some friction there. Tunnel rat. Tough as nails. That man I told you about—the pushy fella. He kept needling Mitch and needling him, trying to find out which way he planned to vote, and finally Mitch yelled, ‘I’ll stick a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger before I put an innocent man in prison!’”
Jude flinched at his loud tone.
“Dad,” Sonny repeated.
Louis waved him off. “Mitch was a character, all right. And I’ll tell you what, I believed him about eating his gun. He was that adamant. You fight for your country, you believe in what’s right, even for people you don’t necessarily like. You don’t get to choose who gets a fair shake. It’s all or none.”
“Mr. Singh,” Emmy said. “The jury voted unanimously to convict Neil Delano. What changed Mitch’s mind?”
“If you’re asking me to guess, I’d say two things,” Louis said. “Ruel’s death hit us all hard, but Mitch had gotten close to him during the trial. They were both big fishermen. Talked about trout like other men talk about women. And the second thingis, I think his marriage was in trouble. His wife just up and disappeared after Ruel’s funeral.”
Emmy gave Louis a careful look. “Do you know if she came back?”
“Oh, yes,” Louis said. “I ran into him at the store a few months later. He told me she came back the day after the trial was over.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Emmy felt a rush of adrenaline as she walked into the station. She knew in her gut that the case was about to break open. There were too many overlapping names, too many coincidences, too many people hiding secrets, telling lies, thinking they were safe because twenty-four years had passed and Neil Delano was gone and the lawyers were dead and the transcripts had been tossed out and the old records had been shredded and nobody was talking, but what they failed to understand was that Emmy knew every cog on every wheel that kept this entire town running.
County agencies, like every other arm of government, tended to lose a lot of paperwork either through mistake or neglect. One rule every department could be relied upon to follow was to always keep receipts. Periodic audits kept track of every dollar that came into and went out of the system, and if you couldn’t account for an eraser, the government would haunt you for the rest of your natural life.
Louis Singh had said it himself. All the jurors who’d served on the Delano trial had been paid fifteen dollars a day. The signed receipts from those payments were stored in the records department deep in the bowels of the courthouse, and Ginny Saddler, who, in addition to being Drake Saddler’s mother, was the clerk of the Superior Court for Clifton County, would know exactly how to find them. The woman had been halfway into her Sunday night drinking binge when Emmy had called her at home. Right now, Cole and Jude were driving Ginny to the courthouse to find the receipts.
Emmy poured herself a cup of coffee in the squad room. Two of her men were doing deep dives into the juror names she’d gotten from Louis Singh. Emmy hadn’t wanted to waste time looking them up on her phone standing outside the hardware store. Deputies Julian Vanderbilt and Levi McGuire were firmly in Brett’s camp. Both men usually smirked every time Emmy gave them an order, but now they had their heads down over their computers.
Brett was in the back talking on the landline. He’d dragged almost every box out of storage and stacked it around his desk to show how busy he was. Emmy was reminded of the pillow forts Cole used to build in the living room. Brett put his hand over the receiver when he saw her looking.
“Emmy.” He motioned for her to come over. “Need to talk to you a minute.”
She walked into her office. Took off her duty vest. Started silently strategizing ways she could approach Bernadette and Reggie. The best way might be to play them against each other. Their strained relationship made a hell of a lot of sense now. Bernadette wasn’t worried about Reggie’s corruption. She was worried that he would expose her for being corrupt, too. The smart play would’ve been to keep Reggie onside, but Bernadette had staked her election on cleaning up Reggie’s department. The right amount of pressure might turn one of them against the other.
Emmy sat down at her desk. Almost everything in this investigation seemed to tie back to the trial. Allison had spent hours researching it. She had left clues for Emmy in case anything bad happened. Even Jude had agreed it all led back to 2002. Emmy had spent hours spinning in circles, but she was finally heading in a straight line.
What do we know?
Ezekial Gilchrist was one of the wealthiest men in the region who didn’t have the last name Clifton. He’d made millions in farming, then branched out into logistics, tying the Flint River to Port Bainbridge, which transported crops to the Gulf of Mexico via Apalachicola.
Twenty-four years ago, Evelyn Gilchrist had been murdered.
The jury had been on the verge of acquitting Neil Delano, the man who’d been accused of killing her. At the last minute, a rookie cop had swooped in with damning evidence. Then one juror had died, another man’s wife had gone missing, and they all came back with a unanimous guilty verdict.
What do we think we know?
There was no way Gilchrist hadn’t used his money and influence to buy a guilty verdict.
According to Louis Singh, there had been one juror who’d kept badgering everyone to reveal which way they were leaning. The Pushy Juror had to be Gilchrist’s man on the inside. He’d figured out who the not guilty votes were and exerted pressure to change their minds.
When that hadn’t worked, he’d bribed them with Gilchrist’s money.
When money hadn’t worked, he’d found other ways.
Mitch Bellingham was a veteran, a man of character who’d believed in right and wrong. Then his wife had been kidnapped, and he’d done the wrong thing for the right reason to get her back. She had been returned home safe at the end of the trial. Ruel Clifton had inherited more wealth than any person ought to have. He’d spent his days fishing, riding his horses, teaching his four sons to shoot, and spoiling his tiny baby daughter. Ruel couldn’t be bought, and his last name had made his family untouchable, so he’d been drowned in the Flint River.
“Emmy, listen.”
