Deadlocked (19 page)

Only two from natural causes. Frances Peterson is the tenth. Was she shot in the face like Sonni Efron?" Mason asked. Samantha didn't answer, Mason hearing her catch her

breath. "Jesus Christ, Lou," she said. "I'll get back to you." The phone rang as Mason set it down. "Lou, it's Sandra. We need to talk." "You've got that right," he told her, smiling grimly. "I'll

be at my office." Mason pulled out of his driveway. The sun was setting but the heat was rising.

Chapter 26

By the time Mason got to his office, the sun was melting the horizon, long shadows advancing in its wake, an orange volcanic rim around the sky. The pale blue neon spelling out Blues on Broadway above the door to the bar was faint competition for the celestial light. Cars were lined up in front, the bar's cool, dark comfort calling people in off the street.

Blues was playing his baby grand when he came in the back way. The clear notes rode over the bar chatter, air-conditioning for the soul, before slipping out the door. Mason paused for an instant, trying to place the tune. Blues jammed with the bass player, trading riffs. Blues had bought the bar when he got tired of playing someone else's gigs; he now played as much for himself as for the people who paid for the pleasure.

Taking the stairs two at a time, keeping the pace down the hall, fumbling with his key, Mason pushed the door to his office out of the way, not bothering to turn on the light. The pages of the accident report quivered in the fax machine, rippled by the breeze from the open door, Mason's hands trembled as he picked them up.

It was a Missouri Uniform Traffic Accident Report. Said so in large print across the top of the first page. The report was divided into sections, beginning with the names, addresses, phone numbers, sex, race, and age of the driver and passenger. John Mason. White, male, age thirty-three. Linda Mason. White female, age thirty. Next there were a series of boxes to be checked off for every detail. Road conditions— wet. Weather—rain. Time—11:00 P.M. And on it went, Mason scanning and double-checking the multiple choice rendition of life and death, disappointed when he saw that the box for witnesses was empty.

The second page ended with a narrative description by the investigating officer and another box labeled Cause. Mason repeated the officer's conclusion, slumping onto the sofa, not believing the sound of his own voice.

"Intentional," Mason said. "What the hell is that?"

"A word that means on purpose, not an accident. A necessary element of every major felony," Sandra Connelly said from the doorway to Mason's office.

She was wearing slacks and a blouse that passed for business casual during a heat wave, the blouse open at the throat, veins in her neck taut against her skin. Mason looked up, forgetting that he'd told her to meet him at his office.

Dead jurors and missing clients had suddenly become nuisances, as had Sandra's appearance on his doorstep. The meaning of the accident report sliced through Mason. "Intentional," the investigating police officer had concluded, meaning that Mason's father had driven through a guard rail and into a ravine on purpose, the only possible purpose being to kill himself and Mason's mother.

For a moment, he didn't blame Claire for not telling him. Nothing she could have said would have softened the blow. She cast life's harsh realities as the brutal truth, shielding her clients from things that would only curse them, no matter how true they were. That's what she'd done for him.

In the next instant, he rejected her, resenting her for cutting him off from a truth he couldn't have imagined. The man that had given him life had taken his own life and his mother's. The fantasy images he'd conjured as a boy of his grand and glorious pop haunted him in a flash of humiliation.

The scar on Mason's chest tightened, like he was being stabbed again, only this time from the inside out. He slipped his hand between the buttons of his shirt, massaging the scar.

"Lou," Sandra said. "Are you all right? I've seen CEOs doing the perp walk that looked better than you do."

Mason folded the pages of the accident report, and put them in the top drawer of his desk. He was burning up, flushed with shock, anger, and shame. The obvious questions banged inside his head, making him dizzy. How could his father do such a thing? What had happened between his parents? What did it mean for him all these years later?

He took a bottle of water from the refrigerator behind his desk, and drank half of it, stalling for time. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to Sandra, or anyone else.

"It's the heat," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, tasting the sweat. "I know you wanted to get together, but something's come up. I'll give you a call in the morning. We'll have lunch."

Sandra crossed the room, standing on the other side of the desk. She clutched the strap of the purse strung over her shoulder like it was a ripcord on a parachute, her other hand palm down on the desk, steadying herself. The tremors at the corners of her mouth looked like fault lines.

She shook her head. "Whatever you just shoved into that drawer will have to wait until morning. We need to talk now."

Mason took a deep breath. His parents had died forty years ago. Sandra was in trouble or headed there in a hurry. That was plain. Putting her and his clients on hold while he figured out what had possessed his father wouldn't bring his parents back. He could leave the accident report in his drawer and never take it out again. Or he could try to make sense of it. What he did about his parents and when he did it wouldn't change a thing. Besides, from the look of her Sandra wasn't going anywhere.

"Okay," he told her. "You called this meeting. What's so important?"

"Whitney King has agreed to meet with you."

"Alone?" Mason asked.

Sandra swallowed. "Yes. I'll be there, but in another room."

Mason finished his bottle of water. "Why didn't he take your advice and tell me to pound sand?"

"Because he's got more testosterone than sense. Going one-on-one with you appeals to his puerile instincts. He wants to do it tonight at his office," she said, coming as close to begging as he'd ever heard her.

Sandra carried a knife in her purse. Unlike a lot of women who carried weapons for self-protection, she knew how to use it and wouldn't hesitate. She didn't rattle easily, but she was barely able to stop from shaking.

"You don't have to represent him," Mason said. "You know that. You can quit. Let him find someone else."

"I don't quit, Lou. You know that. Besides, Whitney has a certain charm that comes from having enough money to get into enough trouble to make getting him out of it worthwhile," she said.

"Then why do you look more swept away than swept off your feet? And why were you checking up on my missing client after giving me the lecture on ethics?"

"I didn't break any rules," she snapped. "Mary wasn't home. If she had been, I would have told her to call you."

"But you had to see for yourself, didn't you?" Mason asked her.

"Yeah," Sandra answered. "I always do and sometimes I don't like what I see. Let's get going. I'll drive. I'm parked in front."

Chapter 27

Mason followed Sandra through the club. Blues was back behind the bar, polishing a glass, listening to a guy on a stool spin a story, watching them pass. Mason met his look, both of them wearing masks. Blues poured his customer a drink, not spilling a drop, not taking his eyes from Mason's back until the door closed behind him.

Sandra pulled out into traffic and whipped around a driver that had slowed down in front of the Uptown Theatre, an art deco remnant from the fifties with a wraparound marquee above the doors. Mason had gone there as a kid to watch monster movies. It had been rehabbed into a venue for rock bands, Bar Mitzvah parties, and book signings, one of each advertised for the coming week.

Sandra was dodging traffic and Mason's questions. He wasn't going for a ride with her without pushing harder for answers.

"Eight of the twelve jurors who acquitted Whitney are dead," Mason said. "One was named Sonni Efron. She was shot in the face last week. Frances Peterson was another one.

She was shot in the face today. Dress it up all you want, Sandra. Whitney's a bad man and you know it."

She gave him a sharp glance that said she'd considered the possibility enough to worry about it. "You think he's bad enough to kill the people who acquitted him?"

"I do," Mason said. "Especially if he fixed the jury and didn't want anyone to find out."

"Whitney was seventeen years old when the trial took place," she said, the words a last plea with herself, not an argument with him.

"So he was a child prodigy," Mason said.

Sandra slipped through traffic, winding through the shops and restaurants on the Plaza. She stopped for a string of tourists crossing the street aiming for the Cheesecake Factory, gunning her Lexus past the last straggler. Someone pulled out of a parking space on Ward Parkway along Brush Creek. Sandra cut off another driver to snag the spot. She got out of the car, slammed her door, and walked to the edge of the creek, arms folded over her heaving chest.

Brush Creek was a quiet canal, broad grassy banks sloping up to the street on either side. The Plaza was on the north shore, its Spanish-inspired architecture and outdoor sculpture lending a cosmopolitan backdrop. Postwar brownstone apartment buildings converted into condos lined the south shore. People jogged on paths alongside the water, ignoring the heat. Gondolas floated past, carrying passengers who had nothing better to do with twenty-five dollars. The last fingers of sunlight laid golden tracks on the water.

"Daniel Boone trapped beaver on this creek in the early eighteen hundreds," Mason said, standing at Sandra's shoulder. "Can you believe that? Tom Pendergast paved it with concrete in the ninteen thirties. Some people think he tossed a few of his political opponents into the cement before it dried."

"You'd make a great tour guide," Sandra told him, biting her lip, not looking at him.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me," Mason told her.

Sandra turned to face him, her hand on his cheek, a quiver rippling along her jaw. "Good old Lou," she said. "You'll be using that line on women until you're too old to remember why."

Mason took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away. "If it's about Mary, where she is, what's happened to her, you've got to tell me."

"I don't know anything about Mary," she said, sticking her hands under her arms, studying Mason, arguing with herself, giving in. "Look, my firm represented Whitney and his family for a long time before I was hired. I spent the weekend reviewing the family files."

"You need to get a life," Mason told her with a teasing smile.

"I know you, Lou. You're going to sue Whitney and you're going to dig up every rock the family laid down before and after Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes were murdered. I was just getting ready."

"What did you find?"

She raked her fingers through her hair, tugging on the ends. "The more money a family has, the more twisted things get. I may have tumbled onto something that puts me in a very bad spot."

Despite what many people assumed, lawyers are governed by complex ethical rules that try to balance more than one right thing at a time. A lawyer can't disclose a prior crime by a client revealed in confidence but must disclose a client's intent to commit a crime in the future. If disclosing the future crime would reveal the prior crime, things get complicated. If the disclosures could get you killed, survival becomes more important than ethics. Mason read Sandra's dilemma in the flutter of her eyes.

"Whitney's past runs all the way to the present," Mason said gently, "and you can't cut one off from the other."

She nodded, adding, "It's not just Whitney."

Sandra's cell phone rang. She took it off the clip on her belt, answering and listening. Her chin was on her chest, her shoulders slack. "Okay. I understand," she said with a grim voice. She closed the phone and started toward her car. "Come on," she added over her shoulder. "We're late."

"Was that Whitney?" Mason asked, barely closing his door before Sandra was back in traffic.

"No. It was Dixon Smith. He's a former federal prosecutor who's on his own now. We're representing defendants in the same case," she answered, keeping her eyes straight ahead, enforcing a brittle calm.

"Okay," Mason said. "Let's get back to Whitney and his family's files."

She tossed her head as if she was shaking off the tremors, giving him a weak smile. "Later," she said. "Let's see how it goes with Whitney."

Mason couldn't tell whether she was concentrating on the cars in front of her or whether she just didn't want to look him in the eye when she lied to him. Mason knew Dixon Smith, had banged heads against him when he was in the U.S. attorney's office. Smith usually defended people accused of violent crimes, leaving the white-collar variety to lawyers like Sandra. Sandra's lie was that Dixon had called her about another case. She was about to tell Mason what she had found in the King family files until Dixon called.

Sandra continued south, cutting east a few blocks then south again on Holmes Road, an artery that would take them to Whitney's office some fifty blocks away.

"Why is Whitney working late? Just to talk to me?" Mason asked.

"Hard as it may be to believe, he might prefer that to going home to a big empty house."

"Where does the lonely rich boy live?"

"Burning Oak, that new golf course project in Lenexa," Sandra answered.

The metropolitan area was bifurcated by the state line between Kansas and Missouri, wealth accumulating in a string of cities that ran together in Johnson County on the Kansas side. Lenexa was one of them, wedged into the western part of the county. Burning Oak offered golf course lots priced at a quarter million on which buyers could build a house for a million-five more and lay down fifty grand to join the country club.

"So what's he doing at the office? Counting his money or stalking jurors?"