Page 35 of Defenseless
“You didn’t end up going to the police, did you?”
She shook her head then fought a yawn. She’d already told this story once, probably in more detail than what she was relaying now. After not talking about it for years, Chad recognized it was taking a lot out of her.
“It’s late and you’ve already told Ethan and the others everything. Why don’t you give me the CliffsNotes?” he suggested.
She futzed with her mug then let out a soft laugh. “Thank you. It’s…weird talking about it after so long. But as I said before. It’s time. We can’t keep running forever. There were good reasons for it at the time, but as Kara recently pointed out, we’re not those scared little girls anymore. And science has changed a lot since that night. If anyone can help us find the evidence we need to end this, it’s you and everyone at HICC. I know that.”
He still had more of her story to hear, but the certainty in her voice—both regarding her decision to talk and her decision to work with HICC—gave him some relief.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he prompted.
She gave a sharp nod but turned away from him as she answered. “By the next day, Kevin Jacobs had spun a story to the media. Over and over, the news reported that he’d been dating my mother for a few months. He said he’d stopped by to say a quick good-night only to arrive at the same time as the first responders. I don’t know how he managed to convince people of that version of the events. The only thing Kara and I could come up with was that when he realized he wasn’t going to catch us, he returned to the house, saw that my phone had connected the 9-1-1 call, and somehow managed to get the first responders towitnesshis supposed arrival. Our house was at the end of a dead-end lane. There was no way he would have been able to drive away without the incoming responders seeing him.”
“Did you have a long driveway?” Chad asked. Sabina nodded. “He probably parked somewhere along the way and waited until he heard the sirens. Then when they were close enough, started back toward the house, making it look like he’d just arrived, and they were following him in.”
“That’s what Kara and I figured, too. But the really big red flag was how, within hours of her death, Kevin Jacobs had put a whole big spin machine into play to protect himself. We didn’t know what it might mean or what we could do about it, but it scared us. Even more than we already were. And so instead of going to the police, we called my mom’s stepbrother, our uncle Mike. Aside from our father, who, at that point, we hadn’t seen in six years, he was the only family we had.
“By the time we called, he’d already been notified of her death. Kevin Jacobs had even stopped by to see if either Kara or I had been in touch with him. Uncle Mike was former CIA and had a pretty good bullshit meter. He didn’t believe a word of Jacobs’sconcern.He said that the only reason an AG from Kentucky might have to come to his home in Tennessee wouldn’t be a good one.”
Chad let out a soft chuckle at that, and Sabina shared a smile. There was nothing quite like a grizzled, experienced intelligence agent to run circles around a politician.
“What did he do when you called him?” Chad asked.
“He told us to hang tight, stay out of sight, and that he’d come pick us up. A day later, he made good on his promise and managed to sneak us out and back to his place. It got…complicated after that.”
“Even more complicated, you mean?”
She tilted her head in acknowledgment. “With each passing day, more evidence appeared pointing to either a vagrant, or at one point, human traffickers, being responsible for my mom’s murder.”
“Traffickers?”
Sabina nodded. “Another Jacobs spin—traffickers had killed our mom and kidnapped us to sell us off. It was a headline-catching story. But after two weeks of subtly promoting the theory, Jacobs started seeding doubts that we were still alive. A few days after that, he had the authorities call off the search. He did, however, keep in touch with Uncle Mike. In the four months after the murder, he called several times to see if we’d been in touch.”
“What kept you from stepping forward? I’m not passing judgment, I’m curious,” he clarified.
“That was Uncle Mike’s call,” Sabina answered. “The evidence continued to support Jacobs’s version of the story. We were the only two witnesses who could dispute it, but if we did, it would be our word against all that evidence. We debated it. For weeks, we debated it. But then the police found the body of a vagrant, ostensibly a man who’d OD’d, in the next county over. He had one of my mom’s rings in his pocket, so they pretty much closed the case.”
“Did your Uncle Mike think Jacobs, or someone in his camp, killed the vagrant to frame him?” Chad asked. Sabina nodded. “He was worried about what might happen to you and your sister if you came forward,” he said, finishing his thought. Had he been in Uncle Mike’s place, he would have been worried, too.
Sabina nodded again. “We agreed not to go to the police, but he did reach out to one of his former colleagues for help. She managed to get all the case files for us so that we could at least understand the scope of Jacobs’s efforts. More importantly, though, she also set my sister and me up with new identities and full background covers. It wasn’t ideal, especially at our age. But until we could prove something, until we had some way of poking holes in Jacobs’s story, it was the safest way.”
Chad agreed. Despite everything that had happened that night, he grieved for the girls Sabina and her sister had been and everything they’d lost. “And one year turned into another, then another?”
She nodded again. “We went to college under our new names. We’d originally planned to attend the University of Kentucky together, but Uncle Mike and I thought it would be best to split up. I ended up in Boston while Kara went to LA.” She paused, and a small smile teased her lips. “And if you’re wondering, Gina took care of that, too.”
“Gina?”
“Uncle Mike’s CIA friend. Not only did she give us new identities, but she also altered some college records to ensure that our new personas were enrolled. Including fake applications, records of the acceptance letter, housing letters. Everything. She was the first person to show me the magic of computers.”
He chuckled at that. It wasn’t hard to picture a young Sabina leaning over this woman’s shoulder and taking everything in. Then he frowned. “It’s not really relevant, but how did you pay for it?”
She huffed a small laugh at that. “Uncle Mike set up a fake scholarship through a bank in Bermuda. He funded it with his own money. The plan was always to reimburse him once it was safe enough for us to come forward. Or until Lalibela and Nalanda Houseman were declared dead, and my mom’s estate came to him.”
“Is there a ‘but’ I hear?”
Sabina set her mug down on the side table and tugged the blanket higher against her chest. He had a feeling what was coming next was the heart of the matter, the real reason behind her secrecy.
Sabina cleared her throat then answered. “While Kara and I were in school, Uncle Mike and Gina kept working on the case. One evening, in May of my senior year, my uncle called to say he might have found something. By then, Jacobs was making a bid for the governorship. I think Uncle Mike was feeling a little desperate and wanted to bring the truth out before Jacobs gained any more power.”
