The First Wife. Tara Quinn Taylor
preceded him into the theater. Or a restaurant. And she’d never reacted. Brad meant nothing to her in the physical sense, no matter how attractive other women found him.
“Who’d he kill?” His fingers slid from her shoulders, but the warmth of his touch lingered. “And why would they think you know anything about it?”
Another surge of panic swept over her.
Jane wasn’t a complete stranger to court. She volunteered at Durango, a Chicago women’s shelter, helping battered women with professional writing like letters and résumés, and helping them gain healing through personal writing, too. She’d been asked to be a supportive shoulder during domestic abuse trials several times. That was how she’d met Brad. He offered free legal advice at the same shelter.
Jane also volunteered as a receptionist one night a week for a local Victim Witness program, a government-funded project that provided free support to victims obtaining protection orders.
She was seasoned. The call that morning, while disturbing, shouldn’t be debilitating her.
“They say he killed Lee Anne.” She couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the words. They just repeated themselves, again and again, in her mind.
“My God. Lee Anne’s dead?”
Brad sounded as though he’d known the woman, rather than just having heard about James’s second wife from Jane. She nodded. “What happened?”
“She was found at the bottom of a cliff.” Jane shuddered, glancing back at the expanse below them. Standing atop the cliff—looking out—could seem like heaven and could quickly become hell. “Her hyoid bone was broken, which could point to strangulation, but there was no obvious bruising there. But there was some on her back.” Jane rattled off the facts as though reading a finance report. They seemed just as distant, just as impersonal. “Lee Anne apparently told a friend that she was going to meet James for lunch. But they never made it to the restaurant she’d said they were going to. Her car was found at the base of a trail leading up to the cliff. James’s truck was spotted in the same area and there were footprints his size at the cliff. Broken foliage and dirt patterns indicated a struggle. His fingerprints were found inside her car and when questioned, he’d said he was at home that morning, alone. They told him his truck had been seen near the cliff. After which he admitted to being in the woods with her, to being in her car, but he claims that they talked and that she was still sitting in her car, perfectly fine, when he left.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Six weeks.”
“They’ve had enough time to go over the body, then. Did they find anything to indicate that she’d been pushed?”
“The prosecutor, a Sheila Grant, said that the coroner found fingerprint-shaped bruising beneath the skin on her back.”
Brad practiced family law these days, mostly representing abused women, but he’d also done a stint as a prosecutor, so he was familiar with the challenges Sheila Grant could be facing. From everything Jane had heard, he’d been a great prosecutor. And he’d been stifled by politics and people above him who were apt to seek convictions and sentences based on factors other than the severity of the crime. Especially if there was an election or a point to prove.
A breeze blew through, rustling leaves and cooling clothes still damp from the sweat she’d worked up on their hike. Chilling her skin.
“What exactly does Ms. Grant want from you?”
And that’s where her throat froze up.
“Jane?”
“She wants me as a character reference.”
Brad studied her from below his lowered eyebrows and she could almost hear that talented brain of his whizzing along. A prosecutor would only seek character testimony from someone who had information that would support the murder theory.
“Did you tell her you would testify?”
“Yes.” And then she quickly added, “But I don’t know what good I’m going to be. It’s not like I expected something like this. I’m in total shock. The James I thought I knew was weak and selfish, but he wasn’t a murderer.”
“Very few people have any idea someone they loved is capable of murder,” Brad said, taking her hand in another unusual show of physical support. Something she rarely needed.
She let him link her fingers with his and held on.
“I come up against it again and again,” he was saying. “The shock. The disbelief. You know this as well as I do. With all of the articles Twenty-Something has done, your volunteer work and the editorials you’ve written, you’re as much an expert on domestic abuse as I am. I’m sure you can quote statistics.”
Probably. Being the CEO of a start-up magazine focusing on issues facing today’s young women did have its benefits. And what she hadn’t gleaned from her work on Twenty-Something, she’d learned through her years of volunteering.
Domestic abuse. Brad’s words, couched in generalities, lay between them. She’d told Brad her ex-husband had been unfaithful. His infidelity had been the reason for their divorce.
She’d told him the truth. At least, as much of it as she’d known.
“Sheila Grant told me this morning that James is a bigamist. And that I’m one of his victims.”
A victim. Jane hated the sound of that. The feel of it. As though she’d been branded.
Brad leaned back, staring at her. “You’re still married?”
“No!” Shaking her head, she squeezed his hand. And still didn’t let go. She’d been hanging out with Brad for a couple of years now and this was the first time they’d held hands. “My divorce is perfectly legal,” she said. “But it hadn’t happened yet when he married Lee Anne. He wasn’t just having an affair with her—he’d taken her to Vegas and married her.”
“Then, he wasn’t really married to her at all.”
“Apparently he’d asked her for a church wedding, complete with an Ohio marriage license, after our divorce, still without telling her about his first marriage. It was for their anniversary. He told her the Vegas wedding didn’t feel legitimate enough.”
“What a guy.”
“Yeah and it gets worse. He married a third time, about eighteen months ago.”
“Let me guess, he didn’t bother divorcing Lee Anne first.”
“Right.”
Brad frowned, taking on the look she’d seen him wear in the courtroom. His thinking face. “If he doesn’t want her around anymore, why not just divorce her?”
Jane relayed what Sheila Grant had told her about the triangle in Chandler, Ohio. Some supposition. Some not. Brad seemed to agree with the prosecutor’s blackmail theories, but Jane didn’t know what to think. The whole thing—James being a bigamist, her not knowing that her husband was lying to her in such a fundamental way—was just too unbelievable.
A lot of men could pull off an illicit relationship on the side. But a second marriage? And she hadn’t even suspected?
Where was the strong, capable woman who’d been given the chance to head up a new national magazine? Who stood at the head of a Chicago boardroom and justified spending thousands of dollars on copy and cover art, layout and gloss? Who, in her spare time, helped vulnerable women find their feet?
Could the real Jane Hamilton please stand up? A mental version of the old television show To Tell the Truth played in her brain. Or should that be, Could the real Mrs. James Todd please stand up?
She was spiraling out of control. Didn’t know herself. Didn’t know what—
“Did he hit you, Jane?”
Brad’s