A Clean Kill (33 page)

I saw him.

Judge Luther Savin lay in the doorway, his shoes sticking through the opening at an awkward and unnatural angle. I breathed deeply. I reached up to touch the back of my neck and came away with a hand smeared thick with blood.

Not knowing how much longer I’d be conscious, I walked forward through the winter storm to stand beside the doctor. I reached down and picked up her shotgun. Through the door, I could see the judge’s round, slack body. Half his neck had been chewed away by a load from his lover’s gun. A black halo of blood spread around his head.

I stepped beneath the sheltered alcove and pushed numb fingers through the mud and grit caked across the top of my hip pocket. The cell phone came out streaked with mud, but the small screen lighted when I
flipped open the keypad with my thumb. I dialed 911 and gave the address. “There’s been a double shooting,” I said. “We need an ambulance and the police.” I asked them to hurry.

I had a shoulder blade full of nine shot. Three stray pellets had punctured skin on the back of my head but hadn’t penetrated skull. Judge Savin had never been an outdoorsman, and he’d made a bad choice. The judge had pilfered shells from Dr. Adderson’s skeet bag. He’d stolen low-brass shells loaded with bird shot that was never designed to bring down a large mammal. By contrast, Dr. Adderson had not made the same mistake. She knew guns, and she’d known where she kept the buckshot.

Nobody—not the police or the doctors, especially not me—told Dr. Adderson that her lover had planned to murder me with
her
gun and then frame her for the crime, likely snapping her neck or something equally unpleasant, in a staged fight with some imagined partner of mine. No one mentioned this to Dr. Adderson for obvious reasons, even though that scenario seemed pretty obvious to everyone involved. No one told Dr. Adderson any of this, but they didn’t need to. She was not a stupid woman.

When I was released from the hospital just before midnight, the nurse told me that Dr. Laurel Adderson had been admitted to the psyche floor. “Just for observation.” But I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be practicing medicine for a while. I thought it’d be longer than that before she found another afternoon’s pleasure firing her Krieghoff masterpiece at flying bits of clay.

Kai-Li picked me up at the hospital in Daphne, but she did not share my bed that night. She understood that the gash Zybo had cut into my nose had been an unfortunate side effect of our plan to capture him. She understood that the mouse over my eye had resulted from being cornered by Judge Savin, Chuck, and Billy at the Mandrake Club. She even understood that I had no control over what had happened to Chuck and Billy later that night. Kai-Li said she
really had
understood these things. The shotgun pellets in my back, however, had been too much—the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her narrow Asian eyes had grown narrower. A white line had formed around her lips.

I pointed out that Judge Savin’s death meant we no longer had to worry about her daughter in Iowa. It meant that she, herself, no longer had to watch for frightening shadows in the night.

Kai-Li had tried to smile. Then she’d gone to sleep in the guest room.

By the next morning, the tension had melted a bit. But it would be Christmas in three days, and I expected now to spend it alone.

“I need to talk to Sheri Baneberry.”

Kai-Li nodded and probed scrambled eggs with her fork. “Time to tie up loose ends.”

“She’s my client.”

Kai-Li glanced up. “You know, Sheri has other problems besides her mother’s death. This is not judgmental. At least, I hope it’s not. But she really should speak to someone about her drinking.”

“Probably,” I said. “But not her attorney.”

Kai-Li ate some eggs and took a small sip of hot coffee.

Might as well ask. “Will you be here when I get back?”

She gave me a wan smile. “Of course. I’ve been thinking about catching a plane to Iowa, but …”

“Can you do that? I mean, will your … your ex-husband … is that okay with him?”

“No.” She pushed back from the table. “It’s not going to happen. I’m just thinking about it.”

I stood and cleared the table of dishes. As I raked leftovers into the disposal, Kai-Li pulled open the dishwasher and waited for me to hand her the plates and glasses. “This is over, Kai-Li. I’ll make it up to you.”

She turned and locked onto my eyes with hers. “Go see your client. I’ll be here when you get back.” She leaned over to close the dishwasher door, then looked up to smile. “Promise.”

Maritime Mutual Assurance occupied a somber brick rectangle only a dozen blocks from my office in the Oswyn Israel Building. I parked on the street. A uniformed guard buzzed me in through a glass-and-steel door.

“Tom McInnes. I’m here to see Sheri Baneberry.”

He scanned a computer printout on a clipboard. “Ms. Baneberry expecting you?”

“Yes. Well, probably not this minute. But she knows I wanted to meet.”

The guard nodded and picked up a phone on his desk. He couldn’t have cared less whether Ms. Baneberry was expecting me or not. He was asking what they’d told him to ask. “Ms. Baneberry. Jerry up front. Yeah. Got a fella here …”

“Tom McInnes.”

“A fella here named Tom McIntosh says you’re expecting him.” He nodded, said, “Yes ma’am,” and hung up. “She’ll be right down.” He pointed with one hand as he picked up a newspaper with the other. “Sit over there.”

I sat over there.

Eighteen minutes passed before the elevator dinged and Sheri Baneberry stepped out into the industrial-decor lobby. She looked ticked. She was wearing that pissed-off smile of hers.

“Tom. I thought I made it clear about meeting with you here.”

“We needed to meet. You didn’t call me back. I knew you’d be here.”

“Well, can this wait? Because …”

“No. It can’t. We need to talk.”

She sighed deeply and turned her back. “There’s an
office down here nobody uses.” She walked away, and I followed her down a narrow hall to a plain particle-board door. When we were inside and Sheri had closed the cardboard behind us, she motioned at one of four metal chairs around a cheap table. “Have a seat.” I did. Sheri sat across from me, tucking her navy skirt tightly around her thighs as she perched on the plastic cushion. “Okay,” she said, “what is it?”

“Have you heard about Judge Savin?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean about the indictment. I’m talking about last night.”

“Yes, Tom. I know he’s dead. I know Dr. Adderson killed him, and I know you were in the middle of it somehow.”

I felt sorry for her, but I’d also had enough of this. “You put me there, Sheri.”

She flushed red, but her features softened a bit. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“What happened to Bobbi Mactans?”

She squinted at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, where is she? The last I heard, Bobbi had come to my house making threats when you were there, and Joey ran her off.”

“Oh. Well, Bobbi called me a couple of times after that. I, uh, didn’t get back with her. She’s fine. There was a message yesterday from her on my answering machine at home.” Sheri hesitated. “It
was
strange, though.”

I waited for Sheri to decide to tell me.

“Bobbi said she was going to take care of things last night, that everything would be like it was.”

My head pounded. My shoulder ached. “Sheri, the
night Bobbi told you she was going to ‘take care of things’ is the same night Judge Savin tried to murder me.”

She shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. She could have meant a thousand things …”

“She could have.” I shifted in the chair to see if a different position would help. “And I’m not accusing her. It’s just, the cops don’t know how Savin got to Doctor Adderson’s farmhouse. Somebody—they don’t know who—drove him there. And they think from footprints in the mud that an accomplice cut the power lines.” I fidgeted some more to find a comfortable place in the ache. “Obviously, that doesn’t mean it was Bobbi. I was just wondering …” Some time passed. “I’d still like to help you, Sheri. I told you from the first that I’m not a plaintiff’s lawyer, but even I know you’ve got the mother of all lawsuits against Russell and Wagler.”

Her eyes rounded above bright red cheeks. “But they’re out of business.”

“Yep. And every one of them is worth a few million bucks. You get in line first, and I think you could wind up with four or five times the money you could’ve ever gotten from Dr. Adderson. And,” I said, “unlike Laurel Adderson, these bastards have it coming. Let me set up a meeting with Sullivan Walker. By the time he’s done, you’ll own Russell and Wagler.”

Sheri looked at the floor. “I heard you helped get off that awful man who poisoned Mom. Is that true, Tom?” And there it was. She was hating me big time for that one.

“His name is Zion Thibbodeaux, and he gave your mom something in her dinner to give her food poisoning.
I don’t know what happened at the hospital, but …”

She glanced up.

I took the opportunity to lean forward and hold her gaze. “I wish I’d been able to wrap up everything in a pink bow, Sheri. I had to make choices. The choice I made was to get Russell and Wagler, to get the people who hired Zybo to make your mother sick.”

“It wasn’t your choice to make.”

I nodded. “Maybe. And maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better, but I don’t think Zion Thibbodeaux ever intended to murder your mother.”

“Yes he did!” She was yelling. “Jonathan Cort saw him …”

“What?”

Sheri stood and reached for the door.

“Sit down.”

She ignored me.

“Sheri, you put me in this. I’ve been knifed, pistol-whipped, disbarred, and pumped full of bird shot. Now sit the hell down and talk to me!”

She sat. “They told us not to say anything. The law firm.” She chewed her nail. Her eyes made designs on the plastic woodgrain tabletop. “I guess it’s okay
now
. The lawyers were probably just protecting their own person who did their killing for them.”

“What did Cort see?”

“The night Mom died. Mr. Cort came by to take Dad to dinner and saw that Zion whazisname leaving Mom’s room.”

“And Wagler told you not to mention it to anyone?”

“Yes, well, he told me to keep quiet after Dad mentioned, you know, in front of me, what Mr. Cort had
seen. I guess it was really more Mr. Cort telling me to keep it a secret than it was Bill Wagler. Mr. Cort threw a fit. He was mad at Dad for talking about it in front of me. Anyway both he and Wagler told me not to tell anyone what he’d seen. Wagler said it was their ace in the hole.”

I needed to think. Sheri said something and I held up a hand. Thoughts swirled in my birdshot-pelted skull. Somebody was lying—either Zybo or Cort—and I didn’t know which. I asked, “Have you been in on the discussions of your mother’s life insurance?”

“What?” Lines formed across her pale forehead. “Well, yes. I’m an actuary. Dad wanted me to look at everything.”

“What about the construction company? Did the partnership have life insurance on your mother?”

“How’d you know that?” She leaned back and studied my face. “I thought that was strange at first. But it’s not. I never knew that the company was started with some money Mom inherited from her grandfather. And Dad said she worked there getting it started right along with him and Mr. Cort. So she was a full partner.”

“How much insurance did they have on your mother?”

“Two-point-four million.”

My head spun from a collision of thoughts. I’d lost enough blood from the shotgun hit to wiggle things around some when I tried to concentrate. “And so what you were saying about your mother being a full partner—does that mean your parents had two-thirds of the business?”

“Until she died, yes.”

“What do you mean until she died?”

“The living partners get the partnership interest of any deceased partner in equal shares.”

“So your mother dies. The next day the partnership gets two-million-four-hundred-thousand dollars, and Cort goes from a one-third partner to owning a full half?”

“Well, yes. But …”

“And Cort’s the only witness that someone other than him killed your mother?”

Sheri stared off into a distance that wasn’t there. Tears pooled along her bottom lashes and ran down flushed cheeks. “That’s
not
it. That
can’t
be it, Tom. That can’t be it.” She sounded less sure with each word.

I stood, and the cheap metal chair banged sharply into the wall. “I’m going to set up a meeting between you and Sullivan Walker, Sheri. He’ll take care of you. He’ll do the lawsuit against Russell and Wagler right. Can I do that for you?”

She nodded.

“Good.” I said. “Now, where can I find Jonathan Cort?” She didn’t answer. “Sheri!” She startled. “I asked you where I can find Cort.”

“Oh, yes. He’s out on a job. The company’s been having problems with a condo project in Gulf Shores. He’s starting the work up again.” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she’d said.

“The insurance money?”

My young client leaned forward and cupped her eyes in both hands. She nodded her head. Her arms moved up and down. “Yes,” she said, “I guess that must be it.”