Dream Chasers (36 page)

“Grab your gear and meet me at the neighbour's side yard.” He didn't give Sullivan time to protest before hanging up. Then he hunched down under the neighbour's tree and counted the agonizing seconds until Sullivan appeared.

“We're not going in,” Green said as they checked their Glocks, “but we need to get close enough to hear. So we're going to scout the house and if possible, get a peek inside.”

Sullivan's face tightened. “Does Tactical know this?”

“They'd just tell me not to. But procedure does tell us to go in if we suspect imminent risk to others. I do.” He hunched over, ducked around the hedge and retraced his steps along the front of McIntyre's house, conscious of Sullivan's steps squishing through the grass behind him. They rounded the side of the house and headed down the path to the back gate. Cautiously, Green eased the latch up and cracked the gate open two inches. He peered through the gap. The pool glistened undisturbed, its surface pebbled by rain. In his line of vision, he could see no sign of O'Shaughnessy. He pushed the gate open enough to squeeze through and pressed himself against the back wall of the house.

The backyard was empty. Ted O'Shaughnessy had disappeared, almost certainly inside the house. Green beckoned to Sullivan and the two of them inched along the back of the house. Up ahead was a large window, further on a set of French doors, and at the far end, a smaller bay window. Ted must have entered by the French doors.

Green signalled Sullivan to check in the first window while he ducked along to the French doors. He pressed himself against the wall, feeling the rough brick against his cheek as he edged forward to peer through the door. He could make out the leather sofas and floor-to-ceiling fieldstone fireplace of the family room. Sullivan came up behind him.

“Nothing,” he whispered, barely audible above the driving rain and howling wind.

Green reached to lay his hand on the door handle, and Sullivan grabbed it. He shook his head vigorously.

“We need to hear,” Green whispered. He pressed down on the handle and felt the door give. It creaked as it drifted open, and both detectives ducked back out of the line of fire. Nothing. Gripping their guns, they stepped through the door onto the polished hardwood floor and eased the door shut, closing the wind and rain behind them. Now Green could hear the faint strains of music. He recognized the sound. Soft, seductive jazz. He held his breath and cocked his head. No voices, just the occasional groan. It could have been a moan of pleasure or a whimper of fear. Beside the family room, the kitchen was also empty, its counters clear except for a collection of empty wine bottles near the sink. He tried to recall the layout of the house. Ahead lay the hall and to the right the closed door leading to the home office. But the jazz wafted through the house from a distant room.

Were McIntyre and Crystal in one of the bedrooms, he wondered? Even more important, where the hell was Ted O'Shaughnessy?

His questions were answered by the ear-splitting crack of a rifle shot, followed by a girl's scream and a man's hoarse shout. The detectives hit the floor and rolled behind the couch, fumbling to aim their guns at the doorway.

“Jumpin' Jesus,” a man bellowed from some far recess of the house. “Ted! You could have fucking killed me!”

“If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead. I want answers!”

In the background, a girl wailed.

“Ted, take it easy, before somebody gets hurt.”

“Get up and get away from the girl.”

“Ted, you don't want to—”

“Get away from the girl!”

“Now listen to me, you ungrateful prick—”

Another shot rang out. The girl's shriek rose higher.

“You gonna shoot the girl, huh? Is that what you want?”

“This is all your fault!” O'Shaughnessy roared, and Green could hear an edge of hysteria in his voice. He and Sullivan were racing across the house and up the stairs. No need for stealth, just speed. “Riley may never play again! You fed him drugs—”

“He never touched drugs—”

“Performance enhancers! You made him crash. All because you didn't want him to see that girl!”

“That was this little lady's idea,” McIntyre replied. “She came up with the plan. You want to kill her too?”

“She's a kid, McIntyre.”

“Some kid. Look at these melons. Want a piece of her too?”

The girl's only response was a whimper.

“You're sick!” Ted snapped. “Why did you do it, huh? You couldn't control him any more? He wouldn't listen to you?”

“Come on, Ted, don't play innocent,” McIntyre snapped. “He was off his game. The most important playoffs of his career, and his focus was shot, all because he was thinking with his dick. Everybody said do something!”

From the top of the stairs, Green could now see Ted looming in the doorway of the bedroom at the end of the hall. He was facing into the room, brandishing his rifle.

“Riley would never take drugs! You tricked him, you freaked him out, and now it's all over. His life, my life...”

As he crept down the hall, Green steadied his gun with both hands. Mentally rehearsed procedure. Aim weapon.
Police! Don't
move!
He prayed for calm. Over the barrel, he glimpsed the massive bed with its red silk duvet tossed on the floor. McIntyre was crouched on the bed in a tangle of sheets, his doughy skin glistening in the reddish glow of a dozen romantic sconces. In his arms, her naked body pressed against his as a shield, was a wideeyed, sobbing girl. She was rigidly still, but as Green reached the door, her eyes locked on his. For a split-second, they widened.

O'Shaughnessy lifted his rifle and started to swing towards the door. Adrenaline shot through Green, and he was just aiming his Glock and preparing to shout when Sullivan barrelled past him and slammed his footballer's shoulder into O'Shaughnessy's side. The rifle flew up in the air, hit the ceiling and clattered harmlessly to the floor. Green dived to retrieve it, keeping his eye fixed on McIntyre and his gun trained on O'Shaughnessy. The man flailed briefly beneath Sullivan's weight, but within ten seconds, Sullivan had him pinned and cuffed.

Crystal had scrambled to the corner, where she cowered, shivering and weeping. Green grabbed the red duvet from the floor and threw it over her.

At that moment, the Tactical Unit burst through the door.

M
cIntyre's
house was in chaos for most of the afternoon. Two
CID
teams arrived to handle the arrests of both McIntyre and O'Shaughnessy. Lou Paquette and his partner showed up with the official search warrant, grumbling about the mountain of physical evidence already collected in the Lea Kovacev case.

“Tell the bad guys not to do another major crime for at least six months,” he warned the
CID
teams in his gravelly, whiskey-soaked voice.

Paramedics swept in to examine Crystal and ultimately take her to the hospital. The girl had been virtually mute since her rescue and huddled in the corner, refusing to answer questions.

“She's in shock,” the senior paramedic told Green. “Plus she's stoned. She's lethargic and doesn't seem to remember how she got here.”

“Did he rape her?”

The paramedic shrugged. “I'll leave that for the
ER
team to determine. There are no visible signs of assault, but I'm betting he fed her something.”

Once he'd recovered his dignity and his clothes, McIntyre began to scream about lawsuits and criminal charges. He protested his innocence all the way into the back of the cruiser, demanding to speak to his lawyer, Green's superior and “whoever really wears the pants in your chicken-shit organization.” He said Crystal and he had a special relationship, and that he'd never realized she was only sixteen. If she was on drugs, she had taken them herself.

Ted O'Shaughnessy said very little, but watched in resigned silence as McIntyre was driven away. A tow truck arrived to take Ted's pick-up truck to the impound yard. Even from a cursory glance, Green could tell Ted had washed the truck bed clean with a pressure washer, but there were plenty of cracks and crevices where blood could still cling. Lyle Cunningham promised he'd examine it as soon as he could climb over the bags of evidence already piled up in his lab.

On Sullivan's advice, Ted didn't say a word about Jenna's murder, but he showed no surprise when the charge was read out, nor did he proclaim his outraged innocence. Green stood on the front lawn and watched him as he was bundled into the back of the cruiser. He looked like a man shell-shocked by the unravelling of his life, as much in disbelief about his own actions as others were.

Sullivan appeared at Green's side, car keys in hand. “You coming with me?”

Green hesitated. He was still flying high on adrenaline, and he knew what awaited him back at the station. Not the thrill of interviewing the witnesses and wrapping up the case, but hours of debriefing, media clamour and damage control. Guns had been drawn, Tac orders ignored, civilians placed in harm's way. It didn't matter that no one had been killed, no shots had been fired, at least by police, and two suspects were now in custody with promising cases against them. The minutia of police protocol would come before all else.

Meanwhile here at McIntyre's house, Lou Paquette and his partner were just starting a thorough search of the premises. Green wanted to hang around to ensure that they uncovered all the sleazy secrets he knew lay within.

By the time he arrived back at the station three hours later, the adrenaline had worn off, but he felt the triumph of a case well solved. Paquette had been able to seize all the photographs, videos, bottles and pills. If even a few of the seizures contained something illegal—underage girls, crystal meth or designer drugs—they should have enough to put the bastard out of circulation for a few years.

Lea's panties were just the crowning touch. Paquette ordered
DNA
testing right away, and maybe in the end, it would be through those panties that Lea would be able to extract her final revenge.

After enduring a remarkably painless preliminary debriefing with Devine, who was just happy that the whole fiasco looked like a success on the six o'clock news, Green arrived down in the squad room to find Sullivan at his computer, preparing his interview notes for Ted O'Shaughnessy. Sullivan glanced up. “You want to be in on this, Mike?”

Green shook his head. “And I don't think you should be either.”

Sullivan frowned. “There's no history between me and Ted.”

“We're both too close, after what went down today. We can coach from the video room, but let's give it to Gibbs. It's time we gave him something to shoot for.”

Sullivan gave him a long, searching stare but put up no resistance. Neither did Ted O'Shaughnessy when Gibbs completed the preliminaries and invited him to talk. Ted had met with a lawyer, but had ignored his pleas to remain silent. He sat rigidly in the interview chair, staring down at the table. Grey stubble darkened his chin, and his eyes were hollow.

“I don't care about me,” he said. “What the fuck does it matter any more? McIntyre's ruined everything, but you'll never get him, you know. He'll weasel out of everything. That girl... I overheard him talking to her in the bedroom, saying he could really help her get ahead, promising her invites to his special parties and dates with his hottest prospects, if she kept quiet about him supplying her the drugs. She was so high, she would have agreed to anything. I couldn't stand to think of him manipulating yet another naïve young kid. I didn't know what I was going to do when I actually found the asshole— probably just scare the shit out of him—but when I heard him smooth-talking her, I wanted to kill the bastard.”

Watching from the video room, Sullivan groaned. “Ted,” he muttered to himself, “you don't want to say that till you've talked to your lawyer again.”

Green glanced at him questioningly, but Sullivan didn't meet his eye.

Gibbs's voice came through the speakers. “Why don't you start at the beginning?”

Ted seemed caught up in his own memories. “This is my fault. From the very beginning. Not noticing the signs, what the guy was really like. Riley's coach tried to warn me, but being down in Gan, with him being up here... But that's no excuse.” He clenched his large fists on the table and thrust himself back in the chair, as if to retreat from the truth. “My wife tried to warn me too, but I kept pushing it. I pushed my son right into the asshole's clutches.”

No one in the video room dared move. Green leaned forward intently. “Let him run,” he breathed into the earphone. “Wait him out.”

Gibbs didn't move. Didn't speak. Ted bowed his head and pressed his fingers to his temples.

“This past week has been sheer hell. I love my son, and I'd do anything for him, but I could tell he'd been on edge, even before his girlfriend died. Like he was wired. Temper flare-ups, refusing to follow his training. I thought it was the pressure, but it was the fucking drugs McIntyre had been slipping him. So when his girlfriend turned up dead, thrown in the river, I thought Riley did it.” He pressed his eyes shut, his chin quivering. “God help me, I didn't trust my own son.”

Sullivan slapped the video room wall, sending a shock wave through the tiny room. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! That's the missing motive! That's the father I can understand.”

Green hushed him sharply. He was watching Ted. Watching the proud, defiant man disintegrate before their eyes.

“Tell me about Jenna Zukowski,” Gibbs said quietly. Unprompted. Good boy, thought Green. Subtle, supportive, a rock solid delivery. Not a single stutter.

O'Shaughnessy wagged his head slowly back and forth. Began to weep. “Knowing what I do now—that Riley didn't do it, that he called that fucking snake for advice—I'd give anything to have that moment back. To take back that punch. She was demanding to see Riley to ask him about his relationship with Lea. I panicked. One punch. That's all it was.” He flexed his fist and stared at it through streaming eyes, as if it were an alien affront. “It sent her flying back against the fireplace. Everyone was out of the house, and once I realized I'd killed her, I knew I had to get rid of the body. Cutting her up, hiding her in garbage bags in the back of my truck, waiting till dark... That was the longest wait of my life. And then having to go back in the morning, to make sure I hadn't left any traces. I just kept thinking, I have to get rid of all the evidence, I have to erase that this happened.” He dragged a deep, sobbing breath into his lungs. “God, if I only could.”