Deadlocked (37 page)

"Victoria King is the only child in that moral dilemma," Mason said.

"That's where you are wrong, Mr. Mason. My vows, my faith, my church. That was my other child. That was my life. That's what I thought I was choosing by keeping silent about Victoria."

"I don't understand," Mason said. "Victoria had nothing to do with the murders of Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes."

"You're correct. She didn't," Father Steve said. He wrapped his hand around the cross hanging from his neck, closing his eyes in a moment of silent prayer, Mason reading his lips as he mouthed
God forgive me.
"Victoria King killed her husband. With this," Father Steve said, taking the tire iron from Mason.

"You mean this isn't the tire iron used to kill the Byrneses?" Mason asked.

Father Steve wrapped the tire iron back in the oilskin, holding it at both ends. "She never said, but I've always assumed that it is."

"Then," Mason said, pacing the small room, "Whitney had to have given it to her. He got rid of his bloody clothes at Ryan's house but hung on to the murder weapon. He must have given it to his mother. She kept it so that the prosecutor couldn't use it to convict her son. But why did she kill her husband?"

"Because my father was going to ruin everything," Whitney King said as he walked into the room.

King was wearing a black suit jacket over a shirt and jeans. The jacket was cut too full and hung unevenly on him. Mason finally recognized it as identical to the one Father Steve was wearing. The butt of a gun poked out of a side pocket. King held another gun in one hand, waving it at the three of them.

"Over there," King said, pointing them toward the sofa.

The priest sat in the corner of the sofa, moist half-moons of sweat under the arms of his rumpled white shirt. His face continued to pale, the pasty shade running through the fleshy folds of his neck, nearly matching the color of his collar. His eyes darted between King and Mason as he licked his dry lips, swallowing hard, his mouth involuntarily puckering for a smoke. Mary chafed at being so close to him, arching her back, setting her jaw with a stiff fury.

Mason didn't move, forcing King to divide his attention. It was a small advantage, but survival was often the sum of slim chances. He only had one card to play, but he waited, choosing the moment.

"Father Steve's clothes aren't a good look for you," Mason told King. "I'd stick to cross-dressing."

King laughed, his chuckle low and guttural. "The Catholic Church isn't known for its fashion sense. I'll give you that. And this rag," he said, sniffing the fabric, "smells like shit, but it was the best I could find in Father Steve's closet while I was waiting for you to get here. My luck, I had to pick a chain-smoking priest."

Mason put it together, shaking his head. "You were wearing Father Steve's jacket when you shot Sandra. Just to make me think it was him. What was the point? You were going to kill me too."

"I never plan on things going exactly like I planned. I just plan on winning no matter what happens," King said. "Turns out Sandra was right. You're a hard man to kill."

"Sandra figured out that your mother had killed your father. That's why she asked Dixon Smith to find out why your mother had been at Golden Years for so long. She was going to tell me and you couldn't let her do that."

"Sandra's firm has represented my family for years. One of the partners suspected that my father's death wasn't an accident. No one else at the firm would listen to him so he buried a confidential CYA memo in my father's files. Unfortunately, Sandra found the memo. Fortunately, when she told me about it, she also told me about the gun you kept in your desk."

"Using your laptop to call her was a neat trick," Mason said. "No phone records and you could call from anywhere. My backyard or the bike path behind your office building."

"C'mon, Mason. Give me some credit. You think I'm lugging around a laptop computer? Here," he said, pulling a palm-sized PDA from his jeans pocket, an earpiece with microphone wrapped around it. "WiFi. The future is now. Slick, don't you think? Besides, everything gets old after a while if you don't give it some flair," he added, stuffing the PDA back in his pocket.

"Even killing people?" Mason asked.

"Especially killing people," King answered. "The end is always the same. It's the journey that counts."

Mason's gut instinct that the Byrneses murders were a thrill killing was right. Whitney King had whet an appetite that couldn't be satisfied. "Is that why you murdered the Byrneses? For the joy of killing?"

"That's too easy an answer," King said. "When Ryan left to go find a gas station, I started talking to the wife. I came on to her and the husband didn't like it. He and I got into it. He came after me with the tire iron, but he slipped on some gravel and dropped it when he tried to catch himself. I picked it up and started swinging. I didn't even think about it. She froze. It was like chopping wood. I didn't appreciate the rush until it was over. Getting away with it was like coming in my pants all over again."

Mason forced himself to act like a lawyer, hide his outrage long enough to get the facts. "But why go after the jury? They acquitted you."

"Some of them said I was innocent because they believed it. Those were the ones I could trust. The others did it for money. I'd never trust someone like that. Give them enough time, and they'll come back for more."

"The jury was deadlocked," Mason said. "How did you get to them?"

"My family had a lot of money," King said with a shrug of his shoulders. "We found the weak jurors, the ones who needed the money badly enough. It wasn't that hard."

"You were only a kid," Mason said. "You couldn't have pulled that off. Did your father do it? Did he have an attack of conscience and tell your mother he was going to the cops? Is that why she killed him?"

King smiled at Mason, his lips flat and bloodless. "You are such a conventional thinker, Mason."

"Your father couldn't have gotten to all the jurors," Mason said. "That was too risky. Someone would have refused to go along or turned all of you in. How did he know which jurors to go after?"

King's smile faded. "It doesn't matter now."

"He doesn't know," Father Steve said, biting the words off as if each was dipped in poison.

"It doesn't matter!" King shouted at the priest, taking a step toward him, sweeping the gun back and forth between Mason and the priest. "So shut your fucking mouth!"

"You don't know, do you? You never knew!" Mason said with sudden understanding. "Your father died without ever telling you and you couldn't stand taking the chance that whoever it was would turn on you. So you started picking them off one by one. You had to stretch it out all these years so the cops wouldn't link the killings. You probably liked that part, didn't you, Whitney? It gave you something to look forward to."

"Like I said, it doesn't matter," Whitney told him.

"It does matter," Mason said. "You've been feeling the heat. That's why you took the chance of killing Sonni Efron and Frances Peterson so close together. That's why you took a potshot at my house and shot Sandra Connelly. You're coming unglued."

King wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow, forcing a smile. "Loose ends, that's all."

"In that case, there are two that you missed. Janet Hook and Andrea Bracco."

"Wrong again, Mason. Andrea's body has never been found. As for Janet, that bitch is a three-time loser no one will ever believe, especially while she's doing time. I'll clean up this mess," he said, pointing his gun at Mason, Father Steve and Mary. "And everything will be back on track."

Mason decided not to tell him that Blues was going to talk to Janet Hook. Her story might turn out to be Mason's epitaph. Instead, he played his last card. "We've got your mother," he told King. "You want her back, let us go."

King smiled again, this time like a child about to get his wish. "Give me that," he said to Father Steve who was still holding the tire iron. "I've been looking for this for a long time. My mother would never tell me what she did with it. Giving it to a priest for safe keeping; now that's brilliant."

He unwrapped the tire iron with his left hand, keeping his gun pointed at them with his right. Hefting it for a moment like a baseball player reunited with a favored bat, he suddenly swung it in a wide arc, smashing it against Father Steve's temple.

"Good as new," King said, as the priest crumpled to the floor.

Mason charged King who sidestepped him, slamming the tire iron into Mason's ribs, sending Mason rolling onto the floor, grabbing his side, his breath coming in painful gasps as his lungs pressed against broken cartilage. Before he could get up, King was standing over him, pointing a different gun at him. It was the one Mason had seen sticking out of King's jacket pocket.

"There's an old limestone horse barn at the south end of Penn Valley Park. All that's left are the outer walls. The city built some kind of theater inside the walls. Meet me there in thirty minutes or Mary dies. Any cops show up and Mary dies," King said, then fired the gun squarely at Mason's heart.

Mason's body went rigid with fifty thousand volts of electricity, shaking violently as the current dissipated. His jellied limbs were useless as he watched King grab Mary by the arm, squeezing until she cried out.

"And don't forget to bring Mom," King said as they left, the tire iron under his arm.

Chapter 52

Thirty minutes wasn't enough time. Whitney had seen to that. Penn Valley Park stretched from Twenty-seventh Street south to Thirty-first, one hundred and thirty hilly acres of prime green space carved out between Broadway on the east and the Southwest Trafficway on the West. He could get there in a few minutes. If he could stand without falling over. If he could leave Father Steve not knowing whether the priest was alive or dead. And if he could pick up Victoria King and convince Harry and Claire to leave the cops out of it.

There wasn't time to brief a SWAT team and put them in play. Instead, siren screaming squad cars would pour into the park like it was the Daytona 500 and Mary would get a bullet in her face. He would have liked his chances better if Mickey and Blues were in the mix, but by now they were probably interrogating Janet Hook at the halfway house in Kansas City, Kansas. It would take them more than thirty minutes to get to the park and take up positions that would provide him with badly needed cover even if he could reach them.

Whitney's timetable was a deadly obstacle course mined with hard choices, any one of which could blow up in his face. Mason belly crawled toward Father Steve. The priest lay on his side, blood seeping from his wound, pooling beneath his head like an unholy sacrament. Mason felt for a pulse, finding a feathery beat.

Pulling himself to his feet, he glanced around the room looking for a telephone, his electrical hangover lifting when he felt the cell phone clipped to his belt. He pried the cover open and tried to punch the numbers 9-1-1 to summon an ambulance for Father Steve. His fingers were clumsy sausages, missing their mark.

"I already called the police."

Mason looked up, closing the phone. It was the young priest, his robe and collar cast off, his short-sleeve black shirt and pants giving him a more militant than religious slant. He was fit, with ropy muscles, his face slightly flushed, jaw set, and ready for whatever he would find in the rectory. He'd told his congregants to stay back, putting himself at risk instead.

"What did you see?" Mason asked, certain that the priest would accuse him of crushing Father Steve's skull.

"Enough," the priest answered. "Where's your car?"

"On Main, across the street from the church."

"You can't go that way. The police will stop you even if one of my congregants doesn't try to play hero. My car is parked behind the rectory. It's the brown Ford Escort. You better hurry," he said, reaching in his pocket and handing Mason the keys. Mason nodded, clasping him by the shoulder for a moments support. "Go with God," the priest added.

"Tell Him to meet there, Father," Mason said.

Mason shuffled through the kitchen, finding his legs. He hesitated a moment when he saw a paring knife lying on the counter next to the sink. Its three-inch blade gave him little comfort when he stuck it in his jeans pocket, hoping he didn't inadvertently stab himself.

He saw blood on the handle of the back door and wondered if King was hurt. He was careful not to touch the blood, realizing instead that it was probably Father Steve's, having splattered onto King's hands.

He ground the gears on the Ford, pulling into an alley behind the church grounds, then looping around to the east and north to avoid the sirens he heard racing toward St. Mark's. He called Claire, giving her a quick summary, extracting her promise not to call the cops and telling her to meet him in front of her house with Victoria.

"There isn't time," she said. "I'll meet you at the park."

"Don't be stupid!" Mason shouted before he realized she'd hung up. He called back, but she didn't answer, not giving him the chance to argue with her. "Okay," he fumed, slamming his palm against the steering wheel. "Be stupid, just not too stupid to live."

He tried reaching Mickey on his cell phone, knowing that Blues rarely carried one and even more rarely had it on when he did. He told Mason that he didn't need a damn buzzer on his hip that people could ring like they ring the bell for service at the butcher's counter. Mickey's phone rang twice before a recorded voice told him that the person he was calling was outside the cellular company's service area, which meant that the halfway house was in a wireless dead zone.

He turned onto Thirty-first Street from Broadway, driving past the edge of the park, straining for a view, immediately understanding why King had chosen the location. The barn was in a hollow just far enough north of Thirty-first and sufficiently below street level not to be visible to passing traffic, though there was hardly any this early on a Sunday morning. Trinity Lutheran Hospital, closed, empty, and abandoned, dominated the ridge above the ruins to the east. The view from there was blocked by tall trees lining the slope beneath the street that ran between the hospital and the park.