Found Money - James Grippando [73]
“You think she’s protecting the person who was blackmailed?”
“I think she knows who paid the money. And I think it’s her job to make sure nobody finds out.”
Ryan swallowed hard. “Then why doesn’t she just kill me?”
“Probably for the same reason she didn’t just kill your father. He must have worked out some arrangement where the secret would be revealed if anything untoward happened to him or his family. It’s a fairly common safety valve in any extortion case.”
“How would it work?”
“Hypothetically, let’s say your father had photographs of a famous TV evangelist having sex with his German shepherd. This is not the kind of thing that advances an evangelist’s career. Your father blackmails the evangelist, but he’s afraid the bad guys might kill him rather than pay him five million dollars. So he sends copies of the photographs to some third party, along with explicit instructions. If Frank Duffy dies under suspicious circumstances, the photographs are to be sent immediately to the National Enquirer. That way, killing the blackmailer accomplishes nothing. The only option is to pay the money.”
“So in my situation, this third party would be…who? My mother?”
“Not likely a family member. Maybe a friend. Maybe someone with no apparent connection to your father at all.”
Ryan fell silent, pensive. Maybe somebody like Amy. Maybe that was why she had balked at his hints to move their relationship beyond business.
“You still there?” asked Norm.
“Yeah, I’m here. I was just thinking. This third party you mentioned. They probably wouldn’t work for free, right?”
“It would be typical to give them a cut of the extortion money.”
“Say two hundred thousand dollars?”
“I guess. Whatever they negotiate. What are you driving at?”
“Maybe it’s best I’m not going to the Cayman Islands after all. There’s something I need to check out back in Denver.”
Norm stiffened, concerned. “You’re getting that funny sound in your voice again. What are you thinking?”
He smiled with his eyes. “I’m thinking that things are just beginning to make sense.”
34
Visiting hours at Denver Health Medical Center started at 7:00 P.M. Liz reached Phil Jackson’s private room at 7:01.
She was eager to see him and make sure he was okay. She walked briskly, then slowed steadily. A journey down the busy hospital corridors triggered memories of Ryan’s medical school residency, back when DHMC was called Denver General Hospital. She remembered the night he’d decided to be a surgeon. She remembered the following nights, too, the years of sacrifice. Ryan worked twenty-hour shifts for wages that didn’t even come close to paying his student loans. They lived week to week on Liz’s paycheck. They saw each other once a day for dinner right at the hospital, usually a ten-minute burger break between her night job and her day job. Ryan had invested so much. She had invested just as much. All for the glorious payoff of life without parole in Piedmont Springs.
For Liz, it was a return to failure. She had grown up dirt poor, one of seven children in a dilapidated four-bedroom farmhouse. She was the only one in her family who had ended up staying in Piedmont Springs. It was a bitter irony. Her heart had been broken when Ryan had gone away to college without her. She was seventeen and left to play mom to six younger siblings, an experience that had taught her never to want children of her own. Four years later, her friends had been so jealous when Ryan invited her up to Denver and asked her to marry him. A medical student. A future surgeon. He could have been her way out. No one had told her it was a round-trip ticket. In hindsight, she should have smelled trouble when it took five years of living together to move the engagement to the wedding.
“Knock, knock,” said Liz as she appeared in the doorway.
Jackson was sitting up in bed and conscious. He looked battered but better than expected. The right side of his face was swollen with purple and black bruises. A bandage covered eleven stitches above his right eyebrow.