Deadlocked (20 page)

Sandra banged her hand on the steering wheel. "Damn it, Lou! Give it a rest!"

He did, keeping his mouth shut the rest of way, his thoughts staggering back to his parents, shredding fabricated images of their lives while Sandra parked outside Whitney's office building. She didn't move for a moment, finally turning the ignition off and taking a deep breath.

"Okay, then," she said. "This is it."

The parking lot was empty, no sign of Whitney's car. Mason assumed there was underground parking or that Whitney had parked on another side of the building, which was one of several in an office park ringed by mature trees with a jogging path laid among them. Park benches and picnic tables were scattered along the outer wall of greenery.

The building was ten stories, packaged in reflecting glass that made it impossible to see inside. It was past nine o'clock, dark, and no one was working late. They were at the entrance to the building when Sandra's cell phone rang again.

"Yes," she said, pausing. "Hello, Whitney. We're outside your building now. Where are you?" Mason tried the door, jiggling it so Sandra could tell that it was locked. "We're locked out," she said. "How long before you'll get here? Fine. We'll wait."

"What's the story?" Mason asked as Sandra stowed the phone and looked around.

"His mother is in a nursing home. He took her out for dinner and has to take her home. He'll be here in about twenty minutes and he wants us to wait. Let's try the bench over there," she said, pointing to one in the shade of the trees lining the jogging path.

"I thought she was in a psychiatric facility," Mason said.

"It's both, really," Sandra said. "Nice place for crazy old people. They have an Alzheimer's unit. Whitney says his mother has a reservation."

The bench was made of a forgiving heavy plastic or light metal. Mason couldn't tell which, only that it was more comfortable than it looked. They sat for a moment, Mason picking out stars. He turned to Sandra.

"You remember the first case we worked on together?" he asked her.

"Hard to forget," she said. "Both of us almost got killed."

"Because we didn't trust each other," he reminded her. "Let's not make the same mistake again."

Sandra pivoted toward him, tucking one leg under the other. "I do trust you," she said, her mouth opening wide at the same instant he felt something sharp and hot pierce the back of his shirt. Her scream was swallowed by his as a jolt of electricity fired a paralyzing spasm through his body.

Mason tried to turn but couldn't make his muscles respond. He was suddenly aware of someone standing behind him, feeling a hand on his shoulder, smelling something familiar, his brain not processing the odor. Seconds unfolded in slow motion.

Sandra raised her hands in front of her face. An earsplitting crack from a gun rocked him as her hands flew away and her face exploded in a spray of blood and bone. Her body splayed across the bench. The shooter grabbed Mason's right hand, wrapped it around the gun, and laced Mason's finger against the trigger with his own, firing the gun again, another burst of blood flowering from Sandra's chest.

Sensation oozed back into his limbs, his movements slow, like he was swimming in molasses. He struggled against the gun that now inched upward across his chest, the hot barrel searing his neck, pressing hard beneath his chin. His hand was more jelly than muscle. His finger was still looped around the trigger, pulling it back against his will, about to leave him a dead puppet when his hand and the gun suddenly dropped in his lap and a hard shove put him on the ground in a heap.

He opened his eyes, rolling over on his back, staring up at Sandra's body. He heard footsteps, someone running toward him. He tried to cry out but couldn't make a sound. He tried to get up, collapsing when his legs refused to move, thrashing his head against the next assault.

Strong hands slipped beneath his shoulders, scooping him up, framing his face, holding him until he stopped shaking.

"I've got you, man," Blues said.

Chapter 28

Mason sat in a patrol car in the parking lot less than a hundred feet from where Sandra Connelly's body lay draped across the park bench. The center of her face was a bloody, pulpy mush, the bullet ripping through her hands, barely slowing. Her neck lay at an uneasy angle across the top edge of the bench, her head dangling off the back, blank eyes turned to heaven. Her arms were spread, one leg still tucked beneath the other; the blood pooling from her chest wound dripped onto her lap.

A cop sat next to him, another in the front seat, neither of them talking. His shirt was splattered with Sandra's blood. He reached over his shoulder to a sore spot above his left shoulder blade, the skin irritated, his shirt torn. Petty wounds. He'd regained his coordination within minutes of Blues's arrival. He tried to explain what had happened, but Blues told him to save it.

Mason understood why. Blues had been a cop long enough to size up a murder scene and this one looked simple. Sandra was dead, shot to death with a gun that Blues found next to Mason. Mason was the obvious suspect and Blues didn't want to be forced to testify to anything Mason told him.

"Let the cops figure it out for now," Blues had told him. "You'll have plenty of time to tell me about it. Get your head straight and keep your mouth shut."

Samantha Greer and her partner, Al Kolatch, were running the scene. Samantha gave him one look, the pain in her eyes like another gunshot. He was standing in the parking lot surrounded by three cops when she arrived while two others interviewed Blues.

"You want to tell me about this?" she asked him.

"Later," he said.

She bit the inside of her cheek, pointing to two of the cops. "Put him in a car and keep him there. And no visitors, especially that one," she said, pointing at Blues who was talking to Kolatch.

Forensic cops searched the area under the glare of bright lights set up to illuminate the scene. They shot video, took still photographs, scraped blood, tissue, and bone from the bench and the ground. They scoured the area for bullets, fingerprints, and footprints. They measured distances and angles, building a case against Sandra's killer. The coroner arrived, examined Sandra's body, giving a silent signal when he was finished. An ambulance crew slipped her body into a black zippered bag, then quietly left the scene.

Samantha motioned to the cop in the backseat to trade places with her. "You want a lawyer or do you want to talk to me?"

Mason didn't blame her for treating him like a suspect, but he was innocent. Blues had given him the same advice he would have given any client, even though he knew that silence could be as incriminating as any confession. He had a lot to explain, but nothing to hide.

"I don't need a lawyer and I know my rights. You can put that thing away," he said as she took her Miranda card from her purse.

"You're covered with the victim's blood. You know I've got to read it to you, Lou," she answered, putting the card away when she finished. "Still want to talk?" Mason nodded. "Okay, what were you and Sandra doing here?" she asked him.

"We were supposed to meet Whitney King. His office is in that building," Mason answered, pointing across the parking lot.

"What were you going to talk about?"

"The murders of Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes. The shooting of Nick Byrnes and the disappearance of Mary Kowalczyk," he answered.

"I got your message and a copy of the missing persons report you filed. Whose idea was the meeting with King?" she asked.

"Mine. I told Sandra I wanted to talk to Whitney alone. At first she told me no, then she talked to Whitney and he said he'd do it. Whitney set the meeting for tonight."

"Where was Whitney?"

"He called Sandra just as we got here and said he'd be late and asked us to wait. He was taking his mother back to the nursing home."

"So you just decided to pass the time on the park bench?"

"That was Sandra's suggestion."

"Tell me what happened," she said.

"Someone came at us from behind the bench, probably from the other side of the trees. I never saw his face. He must have used a stun gun on me. I couldn't move. He shot Sandra in the face, then put the gun in my hand and pulled the trigger again. Then he tried to make me shoot myself with the gun. I guess he wanted it to look like a murder-suicide. He had the gun jammed under my chin when he just let go and knocked me to the ground. Blues must have scared him away."

"Is that it?" Samantha asked.

"That's it."

She reached across to Mason, holding his right hand close to the dome light inside the car.

"Powder burns," she said, letting go.

"I told you," Mason said. "The guy put the gun in my hand and made me pull the trigger. That was the second shot, the one in her chest. I'm sure the first one killed her. The second one was to set me up."

Samantha scratched the side of her face, brushing her hair out of the way, looking at him, then out the back window of the car. "Where'd he get you with the stun gun?"

"Back here," Mason said, pointing to his left shoulder.

"Let me have a look," she said.

Mason was wearing a polo shirt. He hiked it up around his neck, letting Samantha run her fingers across his skin.

"Looks like a couple of red marks, could be a rash. Could be pimples. I don't know."

Mason pulled his shirt down, facing her. "Sam? What's going on? I mean I know how it looks, but it's me, Lou. You don't really think I killed Sandra?"

She motioned to a cop standing outside the car who handed her an evidence bag. She held the bag by the edge, a gun snug against the bottom. "Do you recognize this?" she asked him.

"It's the gun," he said.

"We ran the registration. It's yours."

More than once, Mason had told a client there were worse things than spending a night in jail. Lying on his bunk, prisoners snoring in the cells around his, he didn't bother making a list. The county followed the mayor's heat warnings to a fault. The air in the cell block was warm and ripe. Each time he shut his eyes, he saw Sandra's face in the last instant before the bullet struck her. He heard her say that she trusted him, then watched as her face split open, her head knocked back, her life evaporated.

He felt his hand squeezing the trigger for the second bullet, rubbing his hands together, kneading the skin, unable to shake the sensation. It was like an amputee's phantom pain. He was certain that the first shot had killed Sandra, knew that he'd been made to fire the second shot, but couldn't escape the fear that he had killed her. What if the first shot wasn't fatal? What if he'd fought harder or just enough to alter the aim?

He forced himself to concentrate on what had happened, to resurrect each detail, no matter how trivial, knowing that his freedom and his life could depend on it. He'd had no answer for Samantha when she told him his gun was the murder weapon. She'd handcuffed him and left him in the patrol car, her eyes red and wet. Replaying each second in his mind, making a mental list of each sound and sensation, he knew what trouble he was in because even he doubted the story.

A mysterious assailant appeared out of the woods, incapacitated him with a stun gun, shot Sandra with Mason's gun, and then made him shoot her a second time, escaping when Blues showed up. It was an explanation that threatened Ryan Kowalczyk's story on the
Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not
scale.

The only way he could explain the use of his gun was that someone had stolen it from his office. The last time he'd seen it was when Sandra first came to his office to tell him about Nick Byrnes's e-mails to Whitney King. That was almost a week ago.

Security wasn't tight at Blues on Broadway. A thief didn't have to break in. He could just get lost in the crowd, then wander to the back and up the stairs. The lock on Mason's office door wasn't issued by the Department of Homeland Security. He'd jimmied it open a few times himself when he'd misplaced his key.

The thief would have had to know that Mason kept a gun in his desk. Blues, Mickey, and Sandra were the only ones who knew that he did. Blues knew because Mason had told him. Mickey had also seen the gun, but he was a lifetime away with Abby. Sandra knew because she'd seen the gun and seen him put it away. Sandra might have told Whitney and Whitney may have stolen the gun, but Whitney's mother was his alibi.

If the shooter wasn't Whitney, who could it have been? Someone Whitney trusted enough or paid enough to do the job. Mason clinched his eyes tightly, the jolt of the stun gun leaving him with gaps in his memory. There was something familiar about the shooter, something lurking on the edges of his recollection, playing keep-away with his mind.

He breathed deeply and sat up, the paper slippers they'd given him scraping like sand paper against the cement floor of his cell. He stood and stretched, pacing the eight steps from the bars to the back wall, six steps side-to-side, his fingertips stroking the ceiling as he reached overhead. Pressing his face against the bars, he could barely see a clock at the end of the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. It was just past four in the morning. He lay back on the bunk, his arm over his eyes, and went through it again.

Chapter 29

Two guards ushered Mason into a conference room at eight o'clock Tuesday morning, each of them squeezing his arms hard enough to leave tattoos. Handcuffs chafed against his wrists, while a pair of ankle bracelets slowed his walk to an old man's shuffle. The windowless room one floor beneath his cell was equipped with a midsize table, seating for six, the surface scarred, legs on the chairs uneven. The county didn't have money for new furniture, but the air-conditioning worked fine, cooling the room. The contrast with the cell block punctuated the difference between life on the inside and life on the outside.

Claire Mason stood as he entered, taking a short sharp breath. She was wearing one of the severe gray suits over a white blouse with a high collar that she wore year-round when doing battle, indifferent to weather and fashion. His aunt was broad-backed and pushing six feet; her outfit reminded him of body armor. Today, he liked her style.