Precipice (12 page)

“Do you have the money to afford his raise?” He possessed minimal patience for men like this. They needed hand-holding every minute of the day. The only reason he tolerated Lynch is that despite his obvious shortcomings, he did possess some advantages, not the least of which included an intrinsic gullibility and a skill set that involved acts of persuasion. For these, he was willing to endure a little coddling. It was worth not having to get his own hands dirty.

“What? Me? No…?” The confusion in Lynch’s voice was perceptible over the phone.

“Then find some way to change his mind.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

This man was an idiot.
“Mr. Lynch. Do you remember why I hired you? Because it certainly was not for your intelligence.” The lone sound now was the faint white noise common in cell phones. He sighed. “It was for your unique ‘ability’ to persuade.”

“Yes sir.” The voice on the line trembled.

“Now I want you to go ‘persuade’ this man to change his mind. Use any means you deem necessary.” With that, he dropped the phone to his side and clapped it shut, forgoing the courtesy of a farewell.

He resumed his gaze out the window, envisioning the different view he would enjoy in a few days’ time. That view would be coming through the golden lenses of wealth and fame.

“What happened out there, Randal? What were you thinking?” Dominic returned to the office to find an unhappy Jacob Sloan. “You weren’t supposed to kill our best lead.”

“I didn’t kill him, sir.” Dominic still felt woozy. He’d seen a few dead bodies during his time with SISA, but this was the first time he watched the life drained out of a living soul, the light disappearing from their eyes. Seeing death so real and raw was different. It was a lot to handle. “He was killed by someone who didn’t want him captured alive.”

“Same difference!” Sloan was furious and swore like a sailor with a stubbed toe. “Did you at least catch the person who did it?”

“No, sir,” he mumbled. “I sent agents into the crowd and surrounding buildings to search, but whoever did it disappeared too quickly. We got photos of everyone at the scene and Shannon’s in the process of obtaining footage from nearby security cams though, so we might get lucky.”

“Well, did you manage to get anything out of him before he bit it?”

“Not really,” Dominic admitted. “He was about to tell me something when he was shot.”

“Come on Randal! Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“He acted confused when I asked about Amadi, but he didn’t say much of anything.”

“Maybe he never dealt directly with Amadi and went through a middleman of sorts. Who knows?” Sloan stood by the window, brow furrowed and arms crossed across his chest. He scanned the streets eleven stories down, as if hoping to spot something useful below. “What about Krieger? Where is he?”

“Hospital, sir. When he confronted Ramirez in the club, an altercation broke out between the two of them and a couple of Ramirez’s friends. They got in a couple punches, so Krieger needed to get stitched up. He’s supposed to report in when the doctors finish sewing him back together.”

“Good. I’ll want to debrief him as soon as he returns. Send him in, when you see him. Also, when Faye returns, ask her to look at that video. Maybe Lady Luck was with us this time.”

Nodding in agreement Dominic left Sloan’s office to return to his own. About twenty minutes later, Shannon arrived, security video in hand. “Oh good, you’re back,” he called out to her. “Sloan wants you to take a look at the video as soon as you can. See if you can identify the shooter.”

“No need to. I already did when I picked it up.” Shannon flipped her hair back, putting her hand on her hip. Her eyes twinkled and a confident grin that told Dominic she knew something. “We’ve got our man.”

“Really?” Relief washed over him. It couldn’t bring back Ramirez, but now his mistake wouldn’t end in a total loss.

“Well, technically our ‘man’ is a woman, but yes. She was in the crowd, just barely in view of the camera, but we got her.”

“A female shooter? Did you catch a glimpse of her face?”

“It’s a partial, but it’s enough. Forensics is running it through facial recognition software trying to find a match from the National Security Database. Her expertise with that gun reflected high-level training, so I’m betting she’s either got a criminal record or a prior security clearance. Unless she’s so deep undercover even the Feds don’t know about it, the program shouldn’t take more than a few hours before it spits out a name.”

“Fantastic. Make sure you let Sloan know. Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna sit by myself in the dark here to think.” Dominic waved his hand toward his door and put his head in his arms. Shannon turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.

“You know,” Shannon began. “Ramirez wasn’t your fault.” Dominic didn’t move or make a sound, so she continued. “You couldn’t have done anything to save him.”

“If I had gotten to him faster, or done a better job protecting the scene…But I didn’t and a man is dead. He was our key to reaching Amadi and stopping the next death. And it’s my fault we lost him.” Lifting his head, he leaned back in his chair. The light from the window exposed his red-rimmed eyes, glistening with tears. “I just want to re-write this day, do it all over.”

“I know you do. But that’s the difference between fantasy and the real world. In real life, we don’t get to decide how the story goes.” Shannon approached Dominic. She rested her hand on his shoulder as she continued, “He chose to mingle with the wrong crowd. He knew the risks. It’s not your fault. Besides, we’ve got our lead back. We’ll get this woman, bring her down too…”

“I guess…” Dominic pretended to shuffle through some papers, hinting that he wanted to be left alone.

***

Shannon refused to take the bait. She moved to the other side of his desk and lowered herself in the chair by the door, eyeing Dominic closely. She sighed and shook her head, wanting to help her partner and friend, but unsure what to say. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about Brendan in a long while. Maybe now was the time.

She too suffered pangs of guilt after that night. Over time, that guilt turned to thoughts of revenge, and finally to vengeance. Maybe if someone had sat her down and talked to her, those feelings of blame would have never taken hold and germinated within her. Maybe they wouldn’t have grown into unhealthy weeds, choking out the rest of her life for so long. Even long after the anger subsided, the damaging scars inside her remained.

Dominic wasn’t dealing with the loss of anyone close to him, but the feelings of culpability were the same. He felt responsible for a man’s death, a man that died in his arms. He needed to hear her story. “Dominic, did I ever tell you how I came to work here?”

Dominic stopped what he was doing and looked up. “No. You always deflected the question. Why?”

“Well,” she hesitated, unsure where to begin. “Two years ago, I was engaged to this man named Brendan Malone…” This was the first time that she’d tell the full story, and as she continued, the emotions flowed out. Anger and tears surged through her. For the next fifteen minutes, Dominic sat still, enraptured, but by the time she got to the box of wedding materials and described how reading her vows caused her to undergo an inner change, his face had wrinkled.

“May I interrupt?” he began cautiously

Shannon paused, grateful for a chance to catch her breath. “Yes, of course.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s a horrible thing to happen to anyone. But I don’t understand…how does this relate to you getting this job here?”

A slight upturn appeared at the corners of Shannon’s lips, like a grimace of pain. “That was just the beginning. For the next year, I spent every waking moment either searching for Brendan’s killer or working out to make sure I was ready when I eventually found him. Where the police failed, I succeeded. I studied crime scene photography, read book after book on forensics, pored over interviews, and plotted out every wedding guest’s timeline from the night. I even returned to the hotel to retrace steps. It took months, but I figured it out.”

At this proclamation, Shannon paused. She brushed a few tears out of her eyes and cleared her throat before continuing.

“The police made a mistake when they tried to piece together the timeline. One of Brendan’s uncles, Blair, disappeared for twenty minutes, right within the time frame that the coroner determined the death occurred. His alibi seemed solid. He departed from the bar to go to the bathroom, telling his friends he felt sick and he returned twenty minutes later, pale and claiming to have thrown up. He left the bar, retired to his room, and never came out again until morning.” She paused here to catch her breath.

“But no security cameras had been installed along the hallway to the bathroom. It also contained a door to the kitchen behind the bar. That door was only used during dinner, so was empty at the time, but was unlocked because the bar staff used it to grab extra alcohol if they ran out. I hypothesized he might have ducked through the empty kitchen, slipped into spare workman’s clothes to keep from being recognized on cameras, exited through a service door into the main part of the hotel, intercepted Brendan and killed him, then returned the same way twenty minutes later.”

“But why would he kill his nephew?” Dominic didn’t understand. “Especially on the eve of his wedding?”

“Exactly. I had no idea. Brendan was the most wonderful man in the world. Everyone loved him, and his family was very close. But no other possibilities existed; Blair had to be it. So I tracked Blair down and confronted him.” She paused again, a strange lump developing in her throat. She whispered the next part quickly. “He denied it at first, but proved talkative when exposed to ‘special’ interrogation techniques…”

Dominic’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “You tortured…?”

“If that’s the way you want to look at it,” Shannon murmured. “I’m ashamed of what I did, but I was angry and he did deserve it.” She glanced down, toward her left, reliving a memory too painful and embarrassing to even look at Dominic face-to-face. She cleared her throat again, as if to expel those feelings, before continuing.

“Brendan was set to inherit a large sum of money. A grandfather—on his mother’s side—was quite wealthy and loved little Brendan more than anything. When he died, he requested a large portion of his estate be set aside in a secret account Brendan would gain access to on his wedding day, to help pay for the costs of the honeymoon and send the marriage off on a good beginning. However, if Brandon never married, the money was set to be split between his grandfather’s two children, to do with as they pleased. Since Brendan’s mother died years earlier of lung cancer, the entirety of the money would fall to his younger son Blair.”

“Did Brendan not have any siblings to inherit the money?”

“A younger sister, Emily. But their grandparents died before she was born, so she wasn’t in line to inherit much of anything from him. It wasn’t a well-written will. A few pieces of jewelry passed through her mother, but that’s it.”

“I see. So his uncle killed him over this money?”

“Blair was broke at the time of the wedding. He owed several bookies and his debt was mounting. He’d become more and more desperate. So he decided to do something about it.

“When he slipped off that night, Blair claimed he tried asking Brendan for help, but assumed his nephew was lying when he claimed to not know about the inheritance. His parents never told him to ensure any marriage he entered was about more than money. He had no idea what his uncle was talking about, but Blair assumed Brendan was being insolent and greedy. His anger overtook him and he killed Brendan, ensuring the inheritance would come to him.”

“What did you do?” Dominic asked, a grimace growing on his face. She could tell he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that.

This piece of the story pained her most, though it was the part Dominic needed to hear. “I didn’t kill him if that’s what you mean. My conscience and my lust for vengeance wrestled mightily. I made him suffer, but in the end, my conscience won out and I turned him in. He’s rotting in a cell at Anderton now.”

She sighed. “I turned myself in, pled guilty under a plea deal, and was sentenced to prison. Thankfully, the judge ruled there were significant extenuating circumstances. I walked free three years later, under probation, but with a record wiped clean, on the condition that I stay off the police’s radar.

“They also included a unique provision. I guess my actions reached the federal intel wire, so I was required to provide my services and abilities to the nation’s intelligence agencies. I bested some top minds, and they wanted me on the other side of the law this time…and that’s how I wound up here.”

***

“Wow…” Dominic lips barely seemed to work. He had no clue what to say. His partner not only had her future husband murdered the night before her wedding, she tracked down his killer, tortured him, and served hard time for it. She was ruthless. None of that was mentioned in her personnel file…he reviewed every bit of that folder when she was hired.

“It’s painful. Every single day is a reminder of Brendan. His death is the reason I work here.”

“I had no idea…”

“It’s not like I told anyone. No one else here knows, not even Sloan. It’s several levels above his head. He was told I transferred from the office in Albuquerque.” A deep breath paused her speech. “Ever since then, though, I’ve kept my distance from people, not wanting to get too close. It’s the only way to prevent yourself from getting hurt. I’ve built a shell to protect myself from that pain of loss. That’s why I’m often distant.” Shannon trailed off, leaving an awkward silence. Neither of them knew what to say.

Shannon spoke again, this time quieter, “You went through a lot out there today, but don’t wallow like I did. Absorb the pain, get back up and attack the problem even harder.”

After a few seconds of staring at each other, she rose to her feet, her whole demeanor changing. “Well, I’d better get this tape to Sloan. Check with Cliff and let me know the results of the facial recog.” With that, she spun on her heels and left the room, not glancing back.

Dominic still sat, frozen to his chair. He finally understood why Shannon was so reserved, but for all the time and effort he put into its discovery, he had no idea what to do with the knowledge now that it was freely given. She’d shared something with him, a history so intrinsic to her identity, past and present, yet the unexpected nature of her past threw him for a loop. Having forgotten his own feelings of guilt, he felt an odd sensation swell within him.

Her story of heartbreak, loss, violence, and revenge strangely set him at ease about the case. Shannon had survived much more than he in his sheltered life. Dominic held a deeper respect for his partner, though it was coupled with profound sadness. Her struggles and pains left her with a tough exterior, but little else. Any inner softness was hidden, through her own choices, for protection from pain.