Edwards shook his head. “I didn’t even know about the call until you phoned asking about him. But Chet, the resident I just mentioned? He said Leeds told him it was a reporter who wanted an interview and would pay him good money for his time. So off Leeds went.”

Frankel and Grant traded wary glances.

“Chet didn’t happen to catch the name of this reporter, did he?” asked Grant.

“No,” Edwards answered, his eyes fixing on Grant. “Funny you should ask though. Chet said the man on the other end of the phone had an English accent.”

Chapter 8

8

The fresh air felt good on Timothy Alan Leeds’s face.

For the first time in three decades, he was outside the walls of Sing Sing. It didn’t matter that the temperature was barely above freezing, the sky filled with ominous thunderclouds, and the walk to the bar three times as long as the little man back at the halfway house had told him.

He was barely out a day and already looking at making a small fortune.

A thousand dollars. That’s what the reporter had promised.

Back when he’d been incarcerated, that amount of money would’ve kept an angst-ridden teen rolling in dough for six months. Now, he knew a grand would probably not get him very far in life. But with nothing on his résumé except successfully killing both his parents with shotgun blasts, he knew it was an opportunity he had to jump at.

Not that he didn’t yearn to become a useful member of society who could hold down an everyday job. It was all he’d dreamed about in his ten-by-twenty-foot cell. But he knew he wasn’t going to be anyone’s number one candidate.

Therefore, he hadn’t hesitated in going to meet the man at Connolly’s.

The angry gray surf pounded the shore for miles in either direction. For Timothy, the stark power of the Atlantic and deserted white sand was breathtaking, considering the only view he’d experienced for almost three decades was a metal door and grimy stone walls.

By the time he reached the beach access road where the bar was, he worried he had blown everything by walking instead of trying to cop a ride into town. Connolly’s was housed on the bottom floor of a pale blue-and-white Cape Cod structure and Timothy could see through the bay window that it was empty.

He let out a regretful sigh. The offer was too good to be true; or the reporter had second thoughts. Perhaps the guy feared Timothy had acquired an AK-47 and was going to pick up where he left off years before.