InSight

angered him. Yeah, money can buy anything. Even murder.
    Nothing surfaced about property owned by the Gentry family in either North or South Carolina, other than Carlotta Gentry’s multimillion-dollar home in Charleston, and he found no rental car registered in Stewart’s name or in any name connected with the Gentry family or businesses. No surprise there. He found records of three closed bank accounts in Stewart’s name—two in Atlanta and one in Charleston .
    Luke laid out the facts like pieces of a puzzle. Stewart Gentry must have had access to funds to bribe whoever helped him escape. Someone at the hospital? The scent of money is a powerful aphrodisiac for motivating one to look the other way, especially an attendant paid an hourly wage. But where did he get the money? Those accounts had been closed for years. A family member? Unlikely. He could surmise all day long, but he needed help from someone on the Charleston end.
    Given his tentative position, Luke teetered on the fringe of authority in his own city. How could he extract information from a police department unwilling to buck the local throne of power? And Carlotta Gentry certainly wore the crown.
    Digging deeper into the city’s politics, and almost by accident, he found articles in the Charleston Post and Courier written by a reporter named Matt Devon . He’d investigated accusations that Synthetec, a boutique pharmaceutical company in which the Gentry family owned a controlling interest, manipulated the test results on their new anti-psychotic drug to speed approval by the FDA. Their fake findings also caused a bounce in the stock price.
    Luke accessed Devon ’s email address off the op-ed page of the paper’s website and asked the reporter for help with information about the Gentrys . If Devon agreed, Luke continued, correspondence would have to be through email or an intermediary because of Luke’s inability to hear over the phone.
    * * * * *
    M att read Luke McCallister’s email and wondered what the cop wanted. He wrote him back.
    My series about Synthetec exposed the lengths to which the Gentry family would go to protect their investments, and they didn’t like it. Coincidentally or not, the gas stove in my home exploded, almost relegating me to the obituary column in my own newspaper. The arson inspector suspected tampering but couldn’t prove it. If someone rigged the stove, whoever did it was a pro. Then, not surprisingly, my inside source retracted his story. I publicly charged that the Gentrys were responsible, but again, with no proof, even my own paper warned me to drop the allegation. I was pissed then. I’m still pissed.
    Through back and forth emails, Matt understood that McCallister’s interest centered more on Carlotta Gentry’s motives for keeping her son incommunicado for the last eight years, but he didn’t mind going deeper into her business if reason existed. Devon assured McCallister he had plenty of reason, and much had to do with Stewart Gentry.
    Anything we put together has to be dead on solid. No mistakes, either on my end or yours, Matt wrote. I almost lost my life after the first go-round, and I have little or nothing to show for it except a new kitchen. The police cleared the Gentry Corporation of any wrongdoing. I had to apologize (an act that almost made me puke), and my boss considered firing me for sloppy reporting. I can’t afford another screw-up.
    But I’m in.
    They agreed on a time to instant message, and Matt closed the email. He worried how much help he’d get from a deaf cop. Typing back and forth was slower than talking on the phone. But the cop seemed determined. Determination defined Matt’s life. Must define the cop’s life, too, if he was deaf and still a cop.
    “I’m going to get that bitch yet,” Matt said aloud.

Chapter Seventeen
    The Artist’s Artist

    W ith Daisy at her feet, Abby sat in a straight-backed chair, chilled from the cabin’s damp interior. Her unlined linen suit jacket offered little protection, and she rubbed her arms to warm up. Stewart wrapped a blanket around her shoulders to quell her shivers. He stood behind her, his hands like weights on her shoulders, pushing her down into the earth.
    She shrugged him off. “Where have you been all these years, Stewart?” When he didn’t answer, she asked again. “Where?”
    “In a hospital,” he said. “But I’m better now.”
    “They let you out?”
    His hand crawled across the back of her neck, but he