Collateral Damage (32 page)

“Actually, your husband gave it to me when I went to Germany,” Hannibal said. “I should have given it to you right away, but I thought…”

He wasn't sure how to finish that sentence so she finished it for him. “You thought I'd want to know why Foster would part with it. That was kind of you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you fished it out of our trash. Foster can be a cold man.”

Hannibal reached forward to touch a bookmark sticking out just a bit at the top of the book. Emma moved her hand and he opened the yearbook to the designated page. The room was dominated by the sounds of people rushing more than they needed to on their way to their next destination. Over that noise he heard Emma's small gasp.

“Yes, this is the woman upstairs,” Hannibal said softly. “Joan Kitteridge. She went to school with Oscar. More recently, she was his boss, at her own software company.”

“His boss. Her company.” Emma spat out the words. “I knew that little tramp when she was young and dirt poor. Oscar even brought her home once or twice for a meal.”

“But then she married young, didn't she?” Hannibal asked.

Emma's face reddened, making a sharp contrast to her blue tinted hair. “In Germany,” she said. “She was with him before she was even out of high school. But I understand he died in a training accident.”

Hannibal reached out to take the old woman's right hand in both of his own. The hand was cold, but the veins on its back were a road map of the long and twisted trail he had taken through life. There were secrets buried so deep she could barely see them. He thought now was the time to dig them out.

“Mrs. Peters, I need for you to tell me what it is that ties Joan and her ex-husband to your husband and to Gil Donner. What connects them.”

Emma released one loud sob and a tidal wave of tears spilled out of her eyes. She faced downward, her sorrow splashing onto Joan Kitteridge's teenage face. “The murder,” she said.

Hannibal looked around but none of the travelers stopped to ask about, or even seemed to notice the old woman sobbing in the lobby. Still, he leaned closer to make it clear he was comforting her, and offered her his handkerchief. He couldn't see how Gil Donner or Foster Peters figured in the death of Grant Edwards or Oscar's more recent murder. One possibility remained. “Do you mean Carla Donner?”

Emma nodded, holding the handkerchief to her nose. “Foster covered it all up to protect them. Oh, God, he covered up the murder and somehow, Oscar always suspected. He knew his father had done something wrong. That suspicion drove them apart.”

“You said protect them? The murderer and…”

“Gil,” she said, forcing words through her crying. “He was afraid if there was a real investigation everyone would know…” Hannibal waited for her to regain her breath. “They'd know she was with another man.”

Hannibal was rubbing her hand now, feeling her shake. “And somehow Joan knew about all this?”

This time when Emma's head started nodding it didn't stop. “She must have known. Her husband was having an affair with Carla.”

Hannibal stopped at the hotel room door to add to his tally of victims. While Foster Peters lived with his own actions, his wife Emma felt such guilt about his actions that it had eaten her alive from the inside out for perhaps twelve years. Hannibal had called Ray inside to keep an eye on Emma while he went upstairs to face the conspirators who were almost certainly working at getting their stories straight in case of trouble. He had just raised his hand to knock when the door opened inward and Joan almost walked into him.

“Where you headed, girl?” Hannibal asked, planting a gloved palm in the center of her chest and shoving her back inside. “This is where it gets interesting.”

As Joan fell against the bed Hannibal took the room in at a glance. Donner had decorated his space to look like home. A five or six inch statuette of an infantryman stood guard on the low chest of drawers. What looked like a class photo of men in uniform stood in the center of the round table by the window. Between that table and Hannibal, Gil Donner stood at the writing desk holding the telephone to his ear. As Hannibal stepped past the bathroom door on his left Donner slowly lowered the phone back into its cradle.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Donner asked.

“Giving you a chance to confess and maybe lighten your sentence.”

“I have done nothing,” Donner said, taking one step forward.

Hannibal pulled his automatic from under his right arm and pointed it at Donner's right knee. “Nothing except perhaps destroying evidence and certainly falsifying reports.
Maybe you're just guilty of being a bad cop. Or isn't a provost marshal considered a cop?”

Donner and Joan exchanged a look that seemed more desperate than Hannibal would have expected. Joan sat up on the bed, looking more like a woman than an executive for the first time in Hannibal's experience.

“You don't understand,” she said plaintively. “You can't keep me here.”

“Then why don't you make me understand,” Hannibal said. “While we're waiting here for the police to show up, make me understand why you covered for your ex-husband when he killed Grant Edwards.”

Frozen in place, Donner stammered one word. “How?”

“And I'd really like to know why you covered for him when he murdered your wife.” Hannibal said, leaning against the wall. He was enjoying the stunned reactions of his two-person audience. “I do think I get why Oscar had to die, but it all goes back to your wife, doesn't it Gil?”

“You can't think Kyle Brooks killed Oscar Peters,” Donner said. “He died in a training accident years ago.”

“Please,” Hannibal said, waving Donner into a chair. “If the man was dead, Joanie here wouldn't have had to sneak off to Las Vegas to get a divorce before she could marry Mark Norton.”

“Even if you were right,” Joan said, “why would a man I was married to kill Oscar?”

Hannibal pointed Joan to the other side of the bed where she sat very close to Donner. “I figure it this way. Stop me if I go wrong, now. You, Joan, were a witness to Carla Donner's murder. Either that or your hubby came home and told you he did her in. He was sleeping with her in that little second flat the Donners kept for entertaining their extra curricular friends. In any case, you told your good friend Oscar, didn't you?”

“She caught us up there,” Joan blurted out.

“Quiet,” Donner said. “Don't tell this jerk anything.”

Hannibal sat on the low chest of drawers shaking his head. “You and him. Only you weren't married yet. In fact, you
were probably underage. Okay, Carla goes to her little hideaway and finds her boyfriend going at it with a high school kid. She flips out. Attacks him. He defends himself a little too robustly and kills her. How am I doing so far?”

“This is silly,” Donner said, hands held wide. “Remember this is my wife we're talking about.”

“Yes, and I can't figure yet why you would help cover up her murder,” Hannibal said. “Joan I understand. He married her, so her testimony would be inadmissible. But that didn't last too long. They moved to the States, she dropped her married name and went back to living with her uncle. You have been a handful for him, haven't you?”

Again Joan and Donner exchanged significant looks. Joan opened her mouth to speak, but Donner cut her off. “His theories only work if all the killings were done by one man, and your husband, Kyle Brooks, died in a training accident in Germany.”

“It just doesn't wash, Donner,” Hannibal said. “If her ex really had nothing to do with Grant Edwards' death, why were you asking Walt Young about it?” Donner was still cool, but Hannibal could smell Joan's fear. He kept talking, hoping she would fill in whatever pieces were missing. “I figure Grant was murder number two. Brooks slipped into the house just before Francis got there and stabbed him with a bayonet, then slipped out to let Francis take the rap. You see, Joan had moved on to Grant, and our ghost was jealous.”

“But jealousy can't be a motive for the final murder,” Joan protested. “I was never intimate with Oscar Peters.”

“Oh, no, but he had to die, didn't he?” Hannibal asked. “After all, he was blackmailing you wasn't he? I'm thinking when he and Dean put their heads together, he found out about your connection to Grant Edwards' murder. That led him to suspect that your ex-husband was still alive. And that made you a blackmail target. And that made him a target for your murderous ex.”

Donner shook his head, but that didn't hide the tiny beads of sweat beginning to appear on his forehead. “This really is a pretty fanciful group of conjectures, don't you think?”

“What if everything you say is true?” Joan said, her eyes cutting toward the door. “There's still no reason to hold me. I haven't committed any crime. And I really must be going.”

For a moment Joan assumed the icy confidence Hannibal was accustomed to. She stood, smoothed down her skirt and moved as if she would walk past Hannibal and out the door. Hannibal pulled his gun in beside his waist and cocked his right fist.

“Him I'll shoot if I have to,” Hannibal said. “You I'd just knock down. Remember my job is to save Dean Edwards, and nothing bad happened to him until you moved the knife.”

“What?” Donner stared at Joan, as if waiting for her to explain.

“Nobody else went into Dean's apartment over your garage who was in any way connected to the murders. No one was there after Oscar's death who didn't belong there. Somebody would have noticed a strange man lurking around. So you're the only one who could have hidden the murder weapon in Dean's place. You implicated him.”

“No!” Joan said, still on her feet. “I like Dean. And you have got to let me go before another man close to me is hurt.”

“Another?” Hannibal's mouth dropped open when it came to him. He had been so focused on reconstructing events of the past that he completely forgot about the present. The first killing might have been accidental, and the last may have been to protect old secrets, but the second, Grant Edwards' murder, had surely been about jealousy. He looked up at Joan to find her again staring past him toward the door. She wanted out, and he suddenly realized why.

“Mark,” was all he had time to say before the impact to his lower back sent him sprawling across the room. His right arm hit the writing table and his left hit the bed, leaving no way to reduce the impact when his face thumped into the floor. Through the haze of semi-consciousness he could hear Joan's heels clicking out of the room.

Hannibal felt the gun being pulled from his left hand and braced for the bullet that did not come. Instead he took one hard kick to his midsection. Hannibal felt he deserved it for unforgivable carelessness. Very slowly he turned onto his right side to scan his surroundings.

The cheap carpeting scraped his face when he landed. His breath rasped in his throat. Pain shot up his spine as he moved, but he faced his situation stoically. His sunglasses had flown from his face so he had a very clear view of Cook, Donner's blonde haired escort from the German bar. The man looked even taller standing above Hannibal, pointing Hannibal's own Sig Sauer down at him. He craned his head to find Donner, above and behind him, sitting calmly at the round table, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.

“Well, this is a spot to be in, eh?” Donner said with a faint smile. His hard blue eyes pushed to a squint. “I am fortunate of course, that Cook returned from his errand when he did. Of course, had he found what he was looking for, this would all be over now.”

“I take it Joan's on her way to warn Mark at last?” Hannibal said. “You should have sent Cook with her. In her ex-husband's mind, she's betrayed him. She won't be able to stop him.”

Donner smiled, his chin pushing down into the rolls of skin and fat below it. “I think her position is stronger than yours. Policemen will soon be here, yes? And they will find an elite soldier, a ranger, and a veteran visiting from Germany who have been attacked in their hotel room.”

“They know your hostage is involved in a murder investigation,” Hannibal said as calmly as he could. “And they know that you, Donner, are a part of that investigation.”

“Will that justify the private detective pulling a gun on us in our own hotel room without any hard evidence that we were involved in any wrongdoing? Even a policeman would not have been able to walk in here uninvited without a warrant and point a loaded gun at me. Tell me, who are they more likely to believe? You or me?”

From the hall a voice said, “Won't matter what you say.”

Hannibal's head spun. First his eyes fixed again on his gun. Then he looked past it to Ray standing in the doorway. The gun began to swing away as Cook's face turned toward Ray. This idiot would kill his friend without a second thought. Hannibal hooked his right foot behind Cook's. Then with a grunt he stamped out with his left. His heel smacked into the side of Cook's knee. There was a subtle snapping sound like a small twig stepped on in the woods.

Cook's mouth dropped open and he made a gasping noise as he went down. Ray hopped forward to stamp down on Cook's wrist, holding the gun down. He reached down to recover the weapon.

Donner leaped from his chair and swung a booted foot forward. Hannibal's legs were tangled up with Cook's, limiting his movement. He barely avoided the main thrust of the kick. The heel grazed his head, but despite the flash of pain, he grasped the heel flying past and pushed hard. Caught off balance, Donner fell backward into the round table. Spurred by his rising anger, Hannibal managed to get to his feet just about when Donner did. The older man cocked back a fist, then seemed to reconsider.

“Please,” Hannibal said, leaning back against the low chest of drawers. “Please try.”