Chapter 10
“Hollister’s done.”
“Hollister,” she said, “is replaceable. Everyone is.”
“Is that what happened to Thomas?”
The room went quiet. The fire popped.
Margaret’s eyes moved to me very slowly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your husband. The best sailor Evelyn ever knew. He didn’t fall off a boat, did he, Margaret?”
For the first time since I’d met her, I saw something crack behind her composure.
“Thomas,” she said, “was going to give everything to Catherine’s child. Everything I built. Twenty years I stood beside that man, and he was going to leave me as a caretaker for another woman’s daughter.” Her voice was very soft now. “I gave him six children. And he looked at that girl as if she were the only one who mattered.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get.”
Brandt shifted by the door.
Margaret turned to Laurel. “Darling, would you show Grant the documents?”
Laurel stood. She crossed to a side table, picked up a leather folder, and walked toward me.
Then she stopped halfway across the room, turned, and faced her mother.
“No, Mother,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I will.”
Margaret’s expression didn’t change. But her hand went still around her wine glass.
“Laurel.”
“Six months,” Laurel said. “For six months I’ve been meeting with Agent Reyes. I’m the one who found the SA-7 numbers. I’m the one who gave them to Evelyn, because I knew she was the only one of us brave enough to carry them. And when you asked me to come up here tonight and help you, I said yes.” She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse just enough to show the thin wire taped beneath it. “Because I wanted you to say it out loud. And you just did.”
Brandt drew his weapon.
“Red sky,” I said.
What happened next took less than a minute, and I’ll tell it plainly.
Brandt turned toward Laurel. I moved before I thought about it, the way the Army trains you to, and put myself between them. He had nowhere to go. The glass doors facing the lake shattered inward as the FBI tactical team came through, and the front door came off its hinges a half second later. Brandt looked at the rifles pointed at him from three directions and made the only smart decision of his life. He put his weapon on the floor and laid down beside it.
Margaret Shaw didn’t move at all.
She sat in her leather chair, holding her wine, while an FBI agent read her her rights. When they asked her to stand, she set the glass carefully on a coaster first.
Laurel was shaking. I put my arm around her shoulders.
“You were incredibly brave,” I told her.
“I was terrified,” she said. “Every single day.”
“That’s what brave is.”
At almost the same moment, ninety miles away, federal agents stopped Meredith Shaw at a private hangar outside Charlotte as she was boarding a Shaw corporate jet bound for the Cayman Islands. In her carry-on, they found Evelyn’s laptop.
Outside, under the floodlights, they loaded Margaret into the back of an FBI vehicle. Before the door closed, she looked at me with eyes as calm and cold as the lake.
“You think this is over,” she said. “It isn’t. You have no idea what Evelyn will become when she has all that power. She’s Catherine’s daughter. She’ll ruin everything my family built.”
“No, Margaret,” I said. “She’ll fix it.”
The door closed.
An hour later, sitting in an interview room at the FBI’s Charlotte field office, Cole Brandt asked for a lawyer and a deal. When Reyes came out of that room, she looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“He’s going to plead guilty to the assault,” she said. “And he’s offering something else in exchange for consideration.”
“What?”
“The truth about what happened to Thomas Shaw on Lake Norman twelve years ago.” She took a breath. “Grant, Brandt was working for Margaret back then, too. And he says he wasn’t the only one on that boat.”
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The truth came out slowly, the way it usually does. Not all at once, but one testimony at a time, one document at a time, until even Margaret Shaw’s money couldn’t hold it back.
Twelve years earlier, Thomas Shaw had told his wife he was changing his will. Two weeks later, he’d taken his sailboat out on Lake Norman at sunset, as he did every Sunday. Cole Brandt, then a young security contractor, had been waiting on a fishing boat in a quiet cove with orders from Margaret. What happened out on the water was something Brandt described in a sealed proffer to federal prosecutors, and later to a jury, in a voice that never rose above a murmur.
