The Third Secret Read online

  Praise for the novels of

  TARA TAYLOR QUINN

  “Tara Taylor Quinn has consistently created excellent fiction of the highest quality…. Don’t miss The Chapman Files or anything written by such a wonderful storyteller.”

  —Heather Graham

  “One of the skills that has served Quinn best…has been her ability to explore edgier subjects.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Street Smart is filled with “deception, corruption, betrayal—and love, all coming together in an explosive novel that will make you think twice.”

  —New Mystery Reader Magazine

  “Combining her usual superb sense of characterization with a realistically gritty plot, Quinn has created an exceptionally powerful book.”

  —Booklist on Behind Closed Doors

  “Tara Taylor Quinn’s In Plain Sight is character-driven suspense at its best with rapid-fire pacing that makes you feel as if the pages are turning themselves. I inhaled it in two sittings.”

  —Hallie Ephron, Edgar Award-nominated author of Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel and crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe

  “Lisa Jackson fans will fall hard for Quinn’s unique ability to explore edgy subjects with mesmerizing style.”

  —BookReporter.com

  “Tara Taylor Quinn delivers deeply emotional tales, steeped in psychological suspense…. I consider them essential to my bookshelf, and you will, too.”

  —Maggie Shayne

  Also by Tara Taylor Quinn

  WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

  STREET SMART

  HIDDEN

  IN PLAIN SIGHT

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  AT CLOSE RANGE

  Also in The Chapman Files:

  THE FIRST WIFE (Superromance)

  THE SECOND LIE

  Look for Tara Taylor Quinn’s next novel

  THE FOURTH VICTIM

  available December 2010

  TARA TAYLOR QUINN

  THE 3RD SECRET

  For Kim Barney, Trudy Barney and Jane Barney.

  Being one of you means the world to me.

  Acknowledgment

  I’d like to thank Tim Barney and Paula Eykelhof for generously sharing their creative talents with me and this project.

  This book is much better because of both of you.

  Dear Reader,

  Expert witness and psychologist Kelly Chapman is opening another of her files for you. Writing Kelly’s stories has introduced me to people I’d never in a million years have the chance to know or get close to. And yet they fascinate me, and I hope you’ll feel the same way.

  Why does it sometimes take circumstances beyond our control to show us who we are and what we need?

  Kelly’s a shrink. Maybe she knows the answer to that. Maybe she’s doing this to me (and to us) deliberately—giving us opportunities to experience life outside our own worlds. But if she is, she’s in for a surprise. Because in The Third Secret Kelly encounters people who force her to take a good long look at herself. She’s starting to open her life on a personal level and discovering that it’s hard!

  In this particular case, we meet Kelly’s friend and colleague Erin Morgan. She’s a defense attorney—and she’s just taken on a client with a few too many secrets in his past. If he even has a past…

  Rick Thomas (is that his real name?) was a covert ops agent. With him, we share the reality of always being at risk and the unsettling fact that a “normal” existence of small-town friendships and backyard barbecues can never quite be achieved. Erin enters his life when he’s framed on a murder charge.

  I’m hooked on Kelly Chapman and her files. I’m definitely along for the ride—as evidenced by The Fourth Victim, coming next month. Kelly and I hope you’ll join us!

  I love to hear from readers. You can reach me at Box 13584, Mesa, Arizona 85216. Or through my website, www.tarataylorquinn.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  1

  Chandler, Ohio

  Tuesday, October 12, 2010

  I grabbed for the phone. I’d already turned off the lights and was heading out the door when it rang. The office phone. Not my cell. Deb, my receptionist, waited out in the parking lot.

  She’d say I should’ve let the phone ring. And maybe she was right. But I had a thing about phones. If it rang, someone on the other end needed me for something.

  I had to find out who. And what.

  I had a thing about pencils, too, but at the moment, I wasn’t craving one. Deb and I were going to skate the eighteen-mile converted-railroad skate path outside town.

  “Kelly Chapman’s office.” I’d answered Deb’s phone.

  “Kelly?” I didn’t recognize the voice, and because we’d inherited the ancient phone and intercom system with the office suite, I didn’t have caller display to help me out.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Erin Morgan from Temple, Michigan.” Oh, right. The defense attorney. She’d found me in the expert witness directory the year before—I’d been able to help her with a case.

  “Hi, Erin, what’s up?” I couldn’t take any out-of-town jobs just now. I had a new foster daughter at home, a girl I hoped to adopt.

  Fourteen was a tough age for any kid. And even more so for one who’d lost her virginity and her mother all in the same month.

  “Have you got a minute?”

  As Erin asked the question, Deb came in to see what was keeping me, and I motioned for her to go on without me. “Sure,” I said into the phone. I hadn’t felt good about going out after work, anyway. “Let me get the door.”

  Setting the phone down, I went back and locked up behind Deb.

  Maggie had said to go ahead and skate, to keep up with my usual routine. She claimed she’d be fine—and that she’d make supper so it would be ready when I got home. And because I was still feeling my way, still trying to find some bridge between being a therapist and being a mother, I’d agreed, thinking Maggie needed some time in the house by herself. Time to explore unobserved. To make the place her own. To bond with Camy—my very spoiled and bossy toy poodle.

  But my instincts had been screaming at me all day to go straight home after work. I just couldn’t tell if they were shrink instincts or some completely unused maternal ones.

  “I’m here,” I said, picking up the phone again as I scooted my Lycra-clad backside onto Deb’s desk, facing the door. “What do you need?”

  “I’m probably not going to convince you that I just called to say hi, am I?”

  “Not likely,” I said. Not with an opening line like that. “It’s been, what, a year?”

  “About that.”

  “So how’ve you been?” I liked Erin. And prevarication wasn’t her style.


  Choosing a pen from the box of new ones in Deb’s top drawer—put there expressly for me—I flipped to a clean page in my receptionist’s open notepad.

  “I’ve been good. Great. Got my AV rating this year.”

  The Martindale-Hubbel National Peer Review Rating of ethics and legal ability. A national coup in the legal field. She’d met some pretty high standards. “Congratulations.”

  She’s stalling. I jotted it down. Merely an observation, but I thought better when I was writing.

  “Listen, I have a favor to ask.” As opposed to a job? Interesting.

  Asking for favors wasn’t something that came easily to independents like Erin. I knew because I was one, too.

  “Shoot.” As long as it didn’t involve leaving town, I’d do it. If I could.

  “Well, not a favor, really. I just… Look, I need someone to talk to. Someone not from around here. Someone no one’ll ever know I spoke to.”

  “A therapist, you mean?”

  “I guess. Maybe.”

  “For you or another person?”

  “Another person.”

  Erin just lied to me. The words appeared on the page.

  “You want a referral?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Maybe. I really just wanted to get your opinion. If I could. Not like a session or anything. Though I’d be happy to compensate you…”

  For someone who’d appeared to be as organized and methodical as they came, Erin Morgan hadn’t thought this through very well.

  “Of course you don’t need to compensate me. I told you to call me anytime, and I meant it.”

  That had been a year ago. On the last day of a highly emotional murder trial involving a mentally handicapped defendant who’d been accused of killing her newborn baby. In my opinion, the teenager hadn’t even realized she’d given birth. She’d been exonerated on the grounds of mental incompetence and committed to a home where they’d be able to safeguard her.

  I’d assumed, in the heat of the moment, that Erin and I would remain in touch.

  If not as friends, then as professional peers.

  “You having problems with a case?” I asked as silence hung on the line. Could be she didn’t have the budget for expert witness fees this time around.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I… This friend of mine, he’s really struggling and… Oh…come on, I can’t believe I’m being so inane. I’m struggling, Kelly, and not finding answers and I thought of you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I told her honestly. “What’s the issue?”

  “My job.”

  “You got your AV rating.” I reminded her of what I’d just been told.

  “Yeah.” The sigh on the other end didn’t convey the elation I’d expected. “I’m good at what I do,” the thirty-one-year-old attorney continued. “Hell, I should be, it’s all I do.”

  “And that’s a problem?” Possible relationship. I circled the sentence.

  “No. I love being a lawyer. I love the law.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not sure I love me.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because I’m a risk to society.”

  Whoa. I scribbled it a second time for good measure. Whoa.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Cops put dangerous people behind bars and I set them free.”

  Not the woman I knew. Erin was particular about her cases. She took on only the ones she believed in, clients she was convinced were innocent.

  Which was why I’d bonded with her to the point of thinking we’d stay in touch.

  “I thought you helped innocent victims. That you considered yourself part of the checks and balances to protect against police and prosecutorial mistakes.” I repeated what Erin had told me over a glass of wine the night I’d spent in Temple the year before.

  “I thought so, too. But I’m full of crap.” Searching. Vulnerable?

  “Are you?”

  “I… That’s just it,” Erin said, the strength in her voice, the conviction, never wavering. “I don’t know.”

  Gotta love it. A person who was confident even in her struggles.

  “Are you lying to yourself?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to be a risk to society?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Why do you go to work each day?”

  “To do my job.”

  “Why in a bigger sense?” The words rolled off my tongue. I was working. Always working. Just like Erin Morgan.

  “Because I want to help people.”

  “That’s why you started doing what you do. What about now?”

  “What other reason would there be?”

  “Glory.”

  “It feels good to win a case,” she admitted.

  “And the money?”

  “I like it, but it’s never been my motivation. That hasn’t changed.”

  I believed her.

  “And the AV rating, the security it gives you, that felt good, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Not as good as winning a case.”

  “So it’s all about winning.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if it’s all about winning, then I’ve lost myself. I’ve lost sight of why I’m in this business. I’ve lost sight of right and wrong and everything I stand for.”

  I’ve lost myself. We were at the crux of the matter. And it had taken less than ten minutes. Erin was a lot more together than she thought.

  “Are you sure about that, or afraid of it?” I asked.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be calling you.”

  “What makes you think you might have changed?”

  “My last case, for one thing.”

  “Tell me about it.” I didn’t need the old floral chintz couch in my office. Or the new and luscious leather chairs opposite it that I now used with clients. Or office hours or checks in the bank, either.

  They weren’t what my life was about. Helping people. That’s why I got up in the morning.

  And I’d bet my shingle—the one I loved because the city council bought it for me as a thank-you for chairing the committee to beautify Main Street—that my reason for getting up in the morning was Erin Morgan’s reason, too.

  I got writer’s cramp taking notes as Erin told me about the young man who’d had his driver’s license for barely a year when he’d skidded on wet pavement, losing control of his car—an accident that had ended up involving three other cars and an SUV, killing a thirty-two-year-old man and seventeen-year-old twin girls.

  The young man had been driving a brand-new Corvette, purchased for him by his parents, and he’d been drinking and was subsequently slapped with three charges of vehicular homicide with aggravators, meaning he could be facing twenty or more years in prison.

  “The police took one look at that Corvette and the kid never had a chance,” Erin said.

  I heard doubt in her voice.

  “I take it his parents called you?”

  “Yeah. They were beside themselves with grief and guilt. They blamed themselves for buying him a car that was far too powerful for his limited driving skills. They’d only wanted to reward him for being such a good kid. He was an A student. Worked for his father’s company. Played sports. Dated a girl from church, which he attended regularly.”

  Kid too good to be true, I scribbled sideways in the margin. It wasn’t about Erin. It didn’t really go on her page.

  “So you took the case.”

  “I met the kid first.”

  “And did he seem to be everything his parents said he was?”

  “He seemed spoiled and egotistical, but I put that down to a case of bravado due to fear.”

  Lying to self? That went on Erin’s page.

  “And you took the case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d done some checking. The arresting officer, the one who administered the onl
y drunk-driving test, wasn’t qualified to administer it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “His parents were right on that one. The kid hadn’t had a fair chance.”

  Sometimes the obvious was just too…obvious.

  “And?”

  “The case was highly publicized. If he was found guilty, the kid would be getting the maximum sentence. His life was going to be ruined.”

  As were three other lives. Permanently ruined. I kept the words to myself. My personal opinion meant nothing here.

  “And?”

  “I knew I could win.”

  “So that’s why you took the case?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed to me it wasn’t the kid’s fault his parents had given him a false sense of himself. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. As a matter of fact, he volunteered as a senior youth leader at his church.”

  “So you believed in him and wanted to help him.”

  “I guess so. He had his whole life in front of him. His parents’ eyes were wide-open and they had the resources to fix the damage they’d done, to get him into counseling or whatever it took.”

  “The deaths of three innocent people wasn’t enough to smarten him up?”

  “I thought it was.” Erin’s voice dropped and I could hardly hear what she’d said.

  “Past tense?” I asked, drawing a tiny star on the rubber sole of my tennis shoe.

  “He was acquitted of everything except the traffic ticket for failure to yield. The only price he paid was a fine and points on his license.”

  “Which is what you expected, right?”

  “Yeah, well, what I didn’t expect was that afterward, when he turned to me, there was no thank-you, nor any sign of relief. He called me a loser bitch under his breath because of the points. And just then I looked up—” Erin’s voice broke “—and into the eyes of the young mother who’d lost her husband in the accident. Standing behind her were the parents of the twins who’d also died. Their expressions were the same. Stricken. Shocked. And filled with more questions than I could ever answer. They’d already lost so much and I’d just robbed them of their chance for a small measure of peace.”