James Grayson had been East before, but those other times he'd been lucky enough to find it warm. This time he sat and stared out the window of a coffee shop, almost as chilled on the inside as he was on the outside. Southern California tends to spoil her natives, Gray thought. It makes them believe that there's no such thing as really cold weather. This time Gray had had to buy an overcoat, and he couldn't get beyond considering the purchase as blackmail by Mother Nature.
It was business that had brought Gray East this time, personal business as grim as the winter lifelessness he saw outside the coffee shop window. His business was just as depressing but, after months of digging and checking and questioning reluctant or uninformed people, Gray had finally gotten a break. He had a lead on the people he was certain had framed his brother, and he meant to follow that lead to the very end.
"Thank you for sitting where I'd be able to see you, Mr. Grayson." The soft male voice came from somewhere behind Gray, making him turn. "Now, if you don't mind, let's move to a booth in the back, where other people won't be given the same opportunity I had."
Rather than answering in words Gray took his cup of coffee, got to his feet, and followed his unknown contact to a booth that had no window beside it and wasn't easily seen from the door. They slid into opposite sides of the booth, all the way to the wall, then studied each other in the dimness.
"Do you think you were followed?" the stranger asked, his thin, sallow, mid-fortyish face an inadequate setting for his sharp, dark eyes. The man wasn't Gray's size but he was still tall, looking more skinny than slender despite his overcoat.
"It's impossible to be absolutely certain, but I don't think I was followed," Gray answered, leaning back in his seat. "How about you?"
"I made the effort to be absolutely certain," the man who'd asked to be called Jack answered with a faint smile. "None of the clothes I'm wearing including the underwear are mine so I can't have been bugged, and I chose this place at random out of the phone book. I also watched you for three blocks on your way here. If you have a tail, it's long and loose."
"And you know I'm who I say I am because of the picture I faxed ahead," Gray added with a nod. "That's a lot of precaution for one simple meeting."
"You should know better than that, Grayson," the man said, his voice sharpening despite the lack of volume. "You may have spent the last few years in a peaceful law practice, but before that you were Naval Intelligence. Your background is the main reason I agreed to talk to you, but if you don't start using what you learned we're wasting my time and risking your life."
"I know exactly how dangerous those people are," Gray answered, his own voice as mild as it had been all along. "That fact's been obvious from the beginning. I have to say I admire your sources, to have given you as much background on me as they did. My service record was supposed to have been classified."
"It probably still is," Jack said with a wave of one finger, dismissing the comment. "My source in this instance is a personal friend, who had the information and owed me a favor. For instance, your colleagues in the legal profession think your nickname, Gray, is just a shortening of your last name, Grayson. I happen to know it dates back to your service days, and refers to the kind of personality you can project when you're investigating. You can be so quiet and unassuming, no one notices your being there or considers you a threat. I decided that if anyone can break through on this it has to be you, and that's why I'm here. But I need to know more about why you're here."
"My brother was convicted of murder and sent to prison," Gray answered, feeling his face turn hard and expressionless. "The evidence against my brother was all circumstantial, but taken as a whole the jury couldn't help but convict. He had motive and opportunity and an alibi that didn't hold up, but I know him better than anyone else alive. He isn't a murderer, and no one will ever make me believe he is. Someone set him up, and I'm going to find out who that someone is. Our mutual acquaintance led me to believe you know what's going on."
"Only to a limited extent," Jack said with a sigh, obviously making sure part of his attention was on those who came and went in the coffee shop. "I used to be a cop and a damn good one. I got retired on a disability pension after being shot in the line of duty, then decided to open my own private investigations firm. I handled the easy stuff, background checks, consultation on security procedures, wide-range information retrievals, things like that. And then my old partner from the force, a man I'd worked with for nine years, suddenly turned up dead."
Jack stopped speaking rather abruptly, and a moment later a waitress came over with a cup of coffee for him and a refill for Gray. Once the woman was gone, Jack continued.
"Now, Ed was a good cop," he said, using a spoon to stir the sugar he'd added to the coffee. "The Department claimed he'd been gunned down by some crazy who was probably hopped up on drugs. They made a real effort to find his killer, but when they came up empty I wasn't surprised. Ed would have known better than to get caught by a freak, so it had to be something else."
Jack paused again to sip his coffee, then shook his head.
"About a week after the funeral a package was delivered to my office, sent by some out-of-state info storage service with if-I-die-do-this instructions. The file inside was sealed for privacy, and when I opened it I found newspaper clippings from all over the country and four from right here in the city. They all covered the same kind of story, a murder leading to an arrest and then usually to a conviction, with only two unimportant exceptions."
"Unimportant exceptions?" Gray interrupted after having sipped at his own coffee. "What do you consider unimportant?"
"In one instance, the accused killed himself before a verdict of guilty could be brought," the man answered with a grimace. "The reporter writing the story - and probably everyone else - decided that the man clearly couldn't face the idea of paying for what he'd done. The other exception was a woman who got off on a quirk. Her lawyer found a technicality and used it to her benefit. But all the trick saved her from was doing time. She'd been some high corporate executive, but being brought to trial for murder killed her career good and proper."
"Why do I get the feeling that that outcome was an acceptable alternative?" Gray asked, one finger moving over the side of his cup as he frowned. "You seem to agree with what I said, so tell me what makes you agree."
"Ed worked on two of the New York cases," Jack said with a faint, humorless smile. "He felt there were suspects in each case who might have had really good motives, but who were passed over in favor of the suspect who had it all. He did some quiet checking around to see what became of the overlooked suspects, and in every case someone was better off than they had been. Either they suddenly had a lot more money to spend, or they got the job spot vacated by the victim or the convicted murderer, or they inherited a business, or they were unexpectedly married to someone they shouldn't have had a chance at. Finding that out really made Ed wonder."
"I'll bet he was wondering if those people benefited two ways instead of one," Gray said, the idea coming at once. "Not just from someone's death, but also by having someone specifically blamed for that death. How many clippings did you say he had?"
"Enough to convince him that the cases here in the city weren't coincidences or flukes," Jack returned. "As ridiculous as it sounds, he suspected an organization of some sort, one that operates all over the country. You choose your victim, choose your patsy, pay over your money, then sit back and wait for the windfall."
"That's not my idea of ridiculous," Gray said with a shake of his head. "It's my idea of good police work, but I have a question for you. You and your friend Ed were partners for nine years, and you say you and he continued to be close even after you left the force. If he didn't feel he could trust you, he wouldn't have had his files sent to you. Why you didn't turn the files over to anyone official is clear, since there's no way of knowing who is and isn't involved. Why you aren't following up yourself to find his murderer isn't as clear."
"Would it be clearer if I said I can't trust my own body not to betray me?" Jack asked in turn, pain and shame evident in the dark of his eyes. "I had to face the unpleasant fact that if I tried going up against this organization they would probably have very little trouble stopping me. I almost did it anyway, until I heard that someone connected with one of those clippings was putting out feelers for information in a number of directions. I did my own background check on you, and then I got in touch."
"But not just to tell me you already knew my brother was innocent, but to forget about it because we can't prove it," Gray said, speaking with utter conviction. "You have something more, don't you? Something you can't do yourself, so you want me to do it."
"You're right, but I'm not planning to just toss you out on your own," Jack answered, smiling at the hope and controlled eagerness he had to be able to see growing in Gray. "I can't back you up physically, but my specialty is information and that I can give you. You'll pick out the players, and I'll build the scorecard."
"That's why you went to such lengths to make sure we weren't seen talking," Gray said with satisfaction and a nod of understanding. "The way I've been poking around might just have gotten our opponents' attention, and you didn't want me to lead them to you."
"It's a little more involved than that," Jack said, his dark gaze still steady. "As Ed's ex-partner and best friend, it's likely I've been watched since he was killed. If we can keep them guessing about you long enough we may surprise them. But you'll really need to watch your back. If they do spot you and understand who you are, they'll try to take you out."
"They will if they don't overlook me," Gray countered with a grin that he knew was pure devilment. "Don't forget, being overlooked is my specialty. And if being overlooked doesn't work, they'll have another surprise coming. I'm not all that easy to take out. Now, what have you got and how can we use it?"
"I have a lead Ed picked up, but I'm still working on where he got it," the man answered, leaning forward a bit. "I'd be happier if I knew what it was all about, but since this lead is all we've got we'll have to go ahead with it and hope it takes us somewhere. It looks like something is scheduled to go down, but what it is and which players are involved isn't part of the info. Are you ready to do a little traveling?"
"Where?" Gray asked, also leaning forward. "I'm supposed to be on vacation, so I can go pretty much where I please. But if the destination is someplace no one ever heard of I'll have to lay some groundwork to make the trip look natural."
"That, at least, is one thing you won't have to worry about," Jack said with a narrow-faced a smile. "The place is in Connecticut, but more and more people are hearing about it. It's a resort hotel called the Haunted House."
Gray raised his eyebrows, which made Jack smile again before he went into more detail.