Chapter Twenty-two
Blackstone led Sebastian grimly down a hallway and then into a dark wood-paneled study. Wordlessly, he shut the door, then took the chair behind his desk, motioning for Sebastian to have the seat across from him.
Sebastian remained standing, still trembling with rage. He had no intention of “being handled.”
“You know why I’m here,” Sebastian said, keeping his voice pitched low in case Danbury was outside the door. “You know what he’s done.”
“You’re a fool,” Blackstone said, his features inscrutable. “What do you think you’ve gained by coming here? By punching a viscount in the face?”
“How long have you known?” Sebastian demanded.
“That’s just it,” Blackstone said, his façade crumbling a bit. “I don’t know anything. I just have a feeling. Do you think want to believe this of my own brother? I’ve been trying to prove it wrong.”
“I’ve been trying to prove it right,” Sebastian replied. “I’m not having any luck either.”
Blackstone scrubbed a hand over his face. “What do you have on him? I assume there’s something, or you wouldn’t have had the gall to come here, to his home.”
Reaching into the interior pocket of his tweed vest, Sebastian pulled out Evelyn’s diary. Flipping through the pages, he found the one he’d earmarked and put it on Blackstone’s desk. “Read this.”
Blackstone leaned forward, his dark eyes scanning the page before he met Sebastian’s stare, a look of relief passing across his face. “So? What does that prove?”
“Evelyn told her friend Heather Fields that she was going to meet the man who’d been harassing her, whose proposal she’d turned down, the day before she went missing.” He flipped the diary to the last entry. “Then she wrote this on the very day she went missing.”
Blackstone sank back in his seat, looking as though he’d had the wind punched out of him. “It still proves nothing, but I’m afraid you’re right.”
Frustration built within Sebastian. “Tell me what you know. You obviously suspect him. You did everything in your power to turn my investigation in any direction other than his.”
“I was trying to protect you, not him,” Blackstone claimed. “I can’t go after someone like Danbury for this, even if he is my brother, without irrefutable proof. You know how the system works. You know that a judge would scoff if we tried to prosecute a peer with the evidence we have. Then he’d go free and spend the rest of his days trying to bring us down while still... doing what he’s doing.”
“Murdering young girls,” Sebastian said sharply. “That’s what he’s doing.”
“I know!” Drake said explosively. “I hoped I was wrong. Prayed I was. But I knew Polly Keys had been his mistress. I knew how angry he’d been when she’d broken things off with him. I first suspected when O’Brien showed me the snuff box. I’ve gone through his things and can’t find his, and he used to have it with him all the time. But more than that, I just know him. He’s always been... different. When we were children, he killed things. Cats. Squirrels. Our pet dog. A girl in the village near our country estate who’d rejected him was found murdered... in much the same way as the girls here.”
“And you did nothing.” Shaking his head in disgust, Sebastian stared at him intently. “So why should I trust you with this? Why shouldn’t I go to the commissioner himself?”
“With what? A few coincidences and diary entries that don’t even mention him by name? You know you’d get nowhere. Worse yet, he might demand that you be locked up or fired for hitting him.” Blackstone poured them both a drink from the crystal decanter on his desk and pushed Sebastian’s toward him with a hand that was less than steady. “I can’t keep you from going to the commissioner, but I can promise you that I want to make the bastard pay for this even more than you do. I’m doing everything I can to see him brought to justice. I just need you to give me a little more time.”
Sebastian took a drink of Blackstone’s very fine Irish whisky, staring down the man as he tried to put himself in his shoes. Was Blackstone simply trying to protect his brother, or did he really want to stop him just as badly as Sebastian and O’Brien did?
“You have to start working with me and O’Brien, not against us,” Sebastian said in resignation, finally taking his seat. Either way, Blackstone was right. They couldn’t do this without him and his connections. The commissioner would not want to touch this case with a ten-foot pole if he tried to go over Blackstone’s head. Danbury was a bloody viscount. He was practically untouchable.
“I need you to know that until this afternoon, until I overheard your conversation and you showed me Evelyn’s diary, I didn’t know for certain. All I had were suspicions. I wasn’t trying to get in the way of your investigation, I just wanted to be the one to question the countess.”
Now Sebastian understood. “You want to be the arresting officer. You want to handle the details as delicately as possible when the newspapers get wind of this. You want to be known as the man who arrested his own brother, rather than the brother of a murderer who did not take action.”
“Yes!” For once, Blackstone let his guard down and allowed Sebastian a glimpse of how much this had to have been eating him up inside. “More than all of that, Evelyn was a friend. It kills me that this happened to her.”
“You’re in extreme danger, sir, staying in his proximity.”
“I’ll risk it for the payoff. If my name is to be sensationalized in the papers, let it be as a man of action, not one who let his brother the killer slip past his investigation.”
His investigation? It’s my investigation.
Sebastian nodded. This was about more than just the murders; it was about politics, reputation, and fame. For a few moments, he saw the situation from Blackstone’s side of the desk and understood that at the heart of everything, his boss didn’t want his name to become as infamous as his brother’s after the eventual arrest. He undoubtedly had political aspirations that went higher than the assistant police commissioner, and his brother’s villainy could ruin everything he’d worked for.
They sat in silence for a long time, finishing off their drinks, as Sebastian’s mind raced with everything that he’d learned today, along with his fear for the woman he now knew that he loved.
“Sir, I don’t care who plays the hero here. I’ll take the rear. I’ll have your back in all this if that’s what you want. But what are we going to do to make that bastard stop?” Sebastian asked at last. “I can’t live with any more blood on my hands.”
“Neither can I,” Blackstone said grimly. “But I have a plan.”