Joe said.
Newell shrugged. “Oh, what the hell, I guess it doesn’t matter any longer. My uncle sent me here to check out what was going on with Beth Avery. He thought that she might have been railroaded in there, and he asked me to snoop around and find out.”
“Your uncle?” Eve asked.
“Herman Dalker, he’s a private detective.”
“I know.” Eve recognized the name. Sandra’s “Hermie,” whom she’d hired to find her daughter.
Newell’s gaze shifted to narrow on her face. “How do you know?”
“Did your uncle tell you who hired him for the job? It was my mother, Sandra Duncan.”
“You’re really Beth’s sister? I didn’t know whether to believe you.” His lips twisted. “You’re a little late rushing to rescue her.”
“I’m not making excuses to you. I’m here now. My mother told me that the detective she’d hired had told her that he’d keep an eye on Beth for her. It sounds to me as if he was doing a good deal more than that.”
“He liked your mother. And he didn’t like what he knew about the Avery family. There wasn’t any evidence that they’d done anything wrong, but he didn’t like the setup. So he thought it wouldn’t hurt to send me out to look things over. I needed a break after my last deployment in Afghanistan, and it didn’t seem much of a challenge.”
She glanced at the wound on his neck. “Wrong.”
He shrugged. “Some of the most innocent-looking fields are where the IEDs are planted. I expected to go in and work for a few months, make a report, then go on my way. It didn’t work out that way. I didn’t like the setup. I wanted to see what was happening.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, but it took a hell of a long time. They watched Beth Avery as if she were a crown jewel. The people at the hospital had to get used to me and accept me as if I weren’t there. So while I was waiting, I concentrated on checking out Pierce’s computer records on her. My uncle had trained me on cyberespionage and I had plenty of opportunity to get to the records.”
And if they’d been able to contact Newell, they might never have had to steal those records themselves, Eve thought. “And what else did you find?”
“Nothing incriminating. But her treatment was damn weird. She was drugged, and yet she had plenty of physical exercise. She swam and worked out in the gym. Once they even tried to take her skiing, but that required too much attention, and they were afraid she’d be damaged.” He added bitterly, “That’s the way they put it, ‘damaged,’ as if she were a piece of property they had to keep in mint condition.”
“And not a person at all,” Eve said dully.
“She wasn’t a person to them,” Newell said. “But she was damn important. There were notes by Pierce on the reports congratulating the different doctors and therapists who kept her in the pink of health in spite of the necessary sedatives. He said that it was important to keep her from disintegrating in case the family ever came to check on her. It was of the utmost urgency that they strike a balance until the Averys decided about her disposition.”
“Do you mean whether they wanted her dead?” Joe asked bluntly.
“It was never spelled out, but the implication was there. I got the impression from those years of notes that there was some kind of conflict going on in the Avery family regarding Beth.”
“Because they didn’t just throw her into the hospital and forget about her?” Eve asked. “It seems to me that it came pretty damn close.”
“They definitely didn’t forget about her,” Newell said. “She was a thorn in their existence even though they kept her in that place and tried to make her a zombie. But during the last months, I began to notice a difference in Pierce’s attitude toward her. He cut out her exercise and made her stay in her room. It made me uneasy. I wondered if maybe the ‘disposition’ had been decided upon. I had to find out. So I had Uncle Hermie send me some hi-tech equipment and bugged Pierce’s office.”
“Did it work?”
“Partially. I never heard the call actually setting up the attack on Beth, so I didn’t know who was going to do it or when it was going to take place. He must have made that call somewhere else. But I monitored a call from Pierce to Nelda Avery, and it was