Tail Spin

forgotten—he’d end up being remembered for killing a child in a park, and hiding it.” He sat forward, his hands clasped.
    “Rachael, do you want what happened in the final year and a half of your father’s life to define him? That he go down in history as the rich guy who killed a little girl when he was drunk?”
    Rachael jumped to her feet, began to pace the small office. “I’ve used the very same argument to myself, but I know he wouldn’t! When I tell everyone how he’d planned to confess, surely they would see how moral he was, how ultimately honest.”
    Jack said very gently, “I’ve known since I was twenty years old that the human mind doesn’t work like that. Sheriff Hollyfield is right—your father would be cut to pieces, all the good he ever did in his private life, in his political life, distorted, questioned, erased. As for you, there would be no recognition that you were simply following through on his wishes. You’d be the bastard daughter who destroyed her father’s name.”
    “I know you’re trying to help, but again, I’ve thought about all this, and it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks or says about me. I think you’re wrong, Jack, you have to be.” She shook her head, then tucked her long hair behind her ears.
    Savich looked up from MAX. “Did you tell anyone you were going to make your father’s confession for him since you’ve been back?”
    “I told Mr. Cullifer, Jimmy’s lawyer. I’d have thought Jimmy would have filled him in on his plans, but he hadn’t. He was pretty emotionless about it, told me he’d suspected something was very wrong with Jimmy, asked if I had any proof, like fingerprints or witnesses, which of course I didn’t. He then said if I made Jimmy’s confession for him, I would find myself in a snake pit—people vilifying me, accusing me of lying because he left my mother all those years ago, that I was doing it to get back at him, and he wasn’t even here to defend himself. I’d thought about most of those things, but I’ll tell you, the way he spoke, the utter certainty in his voice, I was nearly ready to flip-flop on my decision. Then I found Jimmy’s journal. It was filled with his misery, his guilt, his hatred of himself for what he’d done, and that’s what made me decide to go ahead, no matter the fallout. I felt I owed it to him.
    “I told Greg Nichols. He heard me out, then said he wasn’t about to help me destroy Senator Abbott’s name and drag the rest of his family through the muck. Of course, he’d be pulled into the muck himself, maybe even do some time in jail, but neither of us mentioned that.
    “I didn’t want to talk to Laurel Kostas and Quincy Abbott since I believe to my toes they killed him, and why. I guess I felt deep down that they’d look at me the same way, as something to be kept silent, or like I was crazy or some sort of rodent who’d crawled into their beautiful, perfect lives.”
    Jack leaned forward, his hands clasped between his legs. “It’s not difficult to connect the dots here. The Abbotts—their holdings and wealth are up there with the DuPonts, the Barringtons, the Jetty-Smiths. I can see they’d hate the scandal, the questions, the media probes about their family ethics, and all the rest. And a possible lawsuit by the little girl’s family, of course. Sure, they might have lost some of their A-list status, but it would have blown over, as every scandal does. But I can’t see them losing much of their money over it, and after all, their brother wasn’t some loser schmuck; he was a United States senator.
    “I’m sorry, Rachael, but I can’t see one or all of them murdering him to keep him quiet. The motive isn’t there.”
    Rachael said, “As an outsider, I saw them very clearly. I cannot tell you how very proud they are. Their sense of entitlement, their sense of worth, their arrogance—it’s off the scale. They worship their name, their lineage, worshipped their father, the founder of the Abbott dynasty. Laurel Kostas’s children attend the finest prep schools, and they’ll attend the finest colleges, both of them destined for power, destined to marry into other prominent families. And Jimmy’s two daughters attest to that. Both their husbands are from wealthy families as well.
    “In their eyes, a scandal like this would ruin the family, and they wouldn’t accept that. They would determine that the removal of this threat was not only justified, it was rational.