The Branson Beauty (31 page)

“No,” Tony shouted, even louder this time. Hank started looking around for a place to stash his phone so it would continue to record clearly. “You took her away from me. I should have protected her.”

Well, that was rich, Hank thought as he wedged the phone into the fork of a tree. He crept closer, staying in the cover of the trees and their still-lengthening shadows.

Roy started shouting, too. He took a few steps forward and waved his hands in the air.

“You'll see what I can do,” he snarled, and dug in the pocket of his voluminous parka.
The gun.
Hank jumped out from the cover of the trees and swung toward Roy, yelling for him to keep his hands raised. Instead, he stared slack-jawed at Hank, his hand still in his pocket.

“Hands where I can see them, Stanton.” Hank slowly reached for his holster and rested his hand on the grip of his Glock. The pain in his shoulder was getting worse, and he hoped he would be able to draw the damn thing if he had to.

The two men stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time, until Roy slowly withdrew his hand from his coat.

There was a snort of laughter. “Yeah, Stanton, get those hands up in the air.” Hank swung around to look at Tony. And the .357 Ruger he was holding. Pointed straight at Roy.

Shit.

His own gun felt as if it had been kept in a sub-zero freezer as he pulled it out and leveled it at Tony.

“Poetic justice, huh?” Tony said. “Her gun, to kill her killer.”

“She got it to protect herself from you,” Hank said, taking a step closer to Tony. Roy hadn't moved since his hand came out of his pocket. His breath was coming in decidedly quicker puffs, however.

“No.” Tony shook his head without taking his eyes off Roy. “She didn't need to protect herself from me. She wanted to be with me. That's why she was back in Branson.”

Roy sneered at him. “She had bad timing. It's all about the timing. Always is. And she didn't have it. Exit stage left.”

Tony's jaw muscles clenched, and the arm holding Mandy's gun trembled. Just a little, mostly in the wrist. The shake right before an inexperienced shooter fires a gun. Hank had seen it many times—in rookie officers on the firing range, in newly minted gangbangers on the street.

Tony moved forward. Hank moved forward. Roy didn't move at all. Then he seemed to make a decision. He drew himself up and threw his arms wide, just as Tony fired.

At the same instant, Hank launched himself across the open snow and tackled Tony, knocking the gun out of his hand. They went rolling toward the shoreline, Tony screaming and swearing and thrashing all the way. Hank finally pinned him to the ground inches from the water. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Roy flat on his back in the snow. Tony would not stop struggling long enough for Hank to reach for his handcuffs, and he'd dropped his own gun sometime during the wrestling match. Fine. He pulled his right arm back and came forward with all his weight behind his fist. The crunch when it hit Tony's jaw was mighty satisfying.

Hank stumbled to his feet and quickly found his gun. He pointed it in the direction of Tony, who was now making a pathetic kind of moaning sound and clutching his face, and staggered toward Roy.

The guy looked as if he were about to make a snow angel. He lay completely still, with his arms outstretched and a smile on his face. He was breathing. When Hank saw where the bullet hole was, he wasn't surprised. The left sleeve of Roy's parka was punctured just above the elbow. Bits of down stuffing floated through the air.

Hank bent down, grabbed Roy's parka collar with his free left hand, and hauled him to his feet.

“No theatrical death for you,” he said.

 

CHAPTER

29

“Will you hold still?”

“No. That hurts. Stop poking at me.”

The doctor glared at him and kept pressing into his shoulder. “Of course it hurts. You tore your rotator cuff. Going to have one hell of a bruise, too. What'd you land on, rocks?”

“I don't know. Probably. I was too busy chasing
a murderer
to notice.” Here he sat, getting his T-shirt cut off in a cold ER exam alcove, and he couldn't even get any sympathy. “Ow.”

His torturer finally stopped and gave him the smile that always made his breath catch. “I'm sorry, babe,” she said. “We're going to have to do an MRI to confirm it. You're going to have really limited range of motion for a while.”

Hank used his still-working left arm and pulled his wife close. She leaned down and kissed him. The chill was finally beginning to leave his bones when the curtain was yanked back.

“Oh, for heaven's sake.”

Hank buried his face in Maggie's shoulder as she turned. “Hi, Sheila,” she said.

Sheila cleared her throat. “Sorry. Didn't realize … well, anyway. Alice is still out at the scene, but it looks like there's only the one bullet fired.”

“I told you that,” Hank said.

“Yeah, well, we still got to do it right. You know that.”

Hank nodded and sat up straighter. “What else?”

“They've arrived at the jail in Forsyth with Stanton. And the kid could be moaning for a reason. You might have broken his jaw. They've got him in X-ray now.”

Hank nodded again, this time with more energy. Sheila rolled her eyes. “Wouldn't have even needed to tackle him if you'd called for backup in the first place,” she said.

Maggie stepped away from him. “You didn't call for backup?” He was always amazed at how instantaneously her sympathetic gaze could turn into a stony glare. She straightened her doctor's coat and turned to Sheila.

“He's lucky I'm not going to give him a Toradol shot in his ass,” she said. “I'm going to check on my other patients.” She stomped out of the alcove.

Hank shifted uncomfortably on the exam table. “Thanks, Sheila.”

She cringed. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you in trouble. But that was a damn fool stupid thing to do.”

Hank bristled. “Even if I had called it in, no one would have been there by the time it all went down.”

Sheila eyed him. He could see her doing land-speed calculations in her head. “Maybe. Close call. It'd be hard to say, definitively.”

“Well, how about you mention that to my wife, okay? I do not need to get in trouble with her for this again.”

Sheila raised an eyebrow and considered him for a long minute. Then she sighed, bent down to the duffel bag she had put on the floor, and pulled out a clear evidence bag.

“This is what was in his pocket.”

Hank flattened the bag on the exam table and stared down at a blueprint of
The Branson Stanton Theater. Coming to the Strip This Summer
. It looked like a complete version of the broken poster board in Gallagher's office. It was heavily creased, and the paper was worn to a shine in several spots.

“I wonder if he had this with him when he killed her?”

Sheila reached over and put her hand flat over the center of the theater. “I would guess so,” she said. “Doesn't look like he went anywhere without it.” She slowly put it back in the duffel. “But if the deal was that he crashed the boat in exchange, how the hell did he manage to do it?” she asked.

“That,” Hank said, pointing to the open duffel bag and Roy's phone, visible inside in its own evidence bag.

Sheila looked at him skeptically, her eyebrow rising toward her hairline again. “What, he called it in?”

“No,” Hank said. “He downloaded it. He downloaded a nervous breakdown.”

*   *   *

Hank placed the phone gently on the table, halfway between him and Roy Stanton, who sat straight in his chair with his hands clasped in front of him on the tabletop. Ready for his scene to begin.

He looked at the phone with mild interest. But his hands held each other a little tighter.

“What movie was it? Or was it a TV show? Or news footage? What did you use?”

Roy looked at him and shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Not really. We'll get a warrant to search the phone and your records. See what you downloaded that would have produced the sounds to send your friend over the edge.”

Hank spun the phone around on the table with his left hand. “This model's got pretty good sound. Must have come through loud and clear. That's probably why you bought the phone in the first place, isn't it?”

Roy nodded.

“How loud did you need to play it?”

Roy put out one hand toward the phone, but then thought better of it and pulled it back to rejoin the other one.

“Very loud. It had to be realistic. I bought a speaker. A little one that connected right to it. It fit in my pocket.” He shrugged. “I knew it would just make him shut down. Then I could nudge the wheel any direction I wanted, walk back downstairs, and let the lake do the rest. It had to look like an accident, like recklessness or stupidity.”

The weather had been perfect. Temperature dropping, storm on the way. He said he'd been watching the forecasts for weeks. Finally, the weathermen said what he needed to hear. So the night before, he'd taken his neighbor's dog and tied the annoying thing up in the woods behind Albert's house. He knew it would bark all night long and keep Albert awake. Prime the pump, so to speak. He smiled. Hank didn't.

“Did you take his shoes?”

“What? Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten about that. I knew he always left his back porch door unlocked. Snagged those after I tied up the dog.”

He sighed again. “It was the perfect plan. The boat gets scrapped, they get their insurance money, and I get my theater.”

Hank leaned forward. “Who's ‘they'?”

Roy blinked at him. Slowly, like the pet turtle he'd had as a kid used to do.

“Terry Cummings, that's who,” he said.

And that was the only name he would give. Cummings was the only person he talked to. Cummings was the one who had the idea to run the boat aground. Cummings was the one who gave him the blueprints. Cummings was the one who showed him the beautiful poster board of his dream theater.

At Gallagher's office?

No, he'd come over to Roy's house. Had a fancy easel, done a whole presentation about how he planned to promote it, how it would be the crowning jewel of the Strip. He, Roy, had finally felt that someone had seen his greatness. Had understood that he needed the proper venue, the proper funding, to bring that greatness to the world. So the money would come from that decrepit old boat. That floating money pit. It was a public service, really, getting that thing off the lake.

And what about all the people it employed?

Roy shrugged. Every man must make his own way in the world. Must seize his own moment. Like he had.

Hank slowly counted to ten.

“Did Cummings mention Henry Gallagher at all?”

Roy thought. No, he didn't. Not once. They went around and around for half an hour, and Roy never deviated. There was never any mention of Gallagher. There was never any mention of Cummings following orders from anyone. Nothing. Nothing but an assumption on Roy's part that Gallagher Enterprises was backing the whole thing. But no proof.

And no, he hadn't started the fire. He didn't know who had. It certainly hadn't been part of the plan he'd cooked up with Cummings. He had done what he was supposed to do: disable the boat without hurting anyone.

“Well … almost no one.” He gave a fatalistic little smile.

Hank wasn't even angry anymore. Just sad. Sad and tired. And a little bit sick as he sat across from this man. He picked up Roy's phone, left its owner sitting at the table, and went into the adjoining room, where Sheila and Sam had been watching through the two-way mirror.

“Did you get them?” he asked Sheila.

She held up a large envelope.

“Hey…” Sam said cautiously. “Why … um, why haven't you asked about Mandy Bryson yet?”

Hank took the envelope from Sheila. “Because I wanted these first.”

He walked back into the interrogation room, pulled a stack of photos out of the envelope, and laid them one at a time in front of Stanton.

The first showed Mandy Bryson on the blue dining room carpet. The second showed her on the table at the morgue. The third was a close-up of the strangulation bruises on her neck. The fourth had her cut open, mid-autopsy.

“I'd really rather not see these.” Roy was starting to look a little green.

“Why not? This is your handiwork. This is your plan in action.”

Roy's jowls trembled. He pulled his hands out of sight under the table.

“She was not part of the plan. She was a surprise. How was I supposed to know that some kid would be on board and refuse to be part of the birthday party? And that she'd want to say hi to Albert? What are the chances of that?
What are the chances?
” His shoulders pitched forward and his eyes turned imploring.

“You could have called it off.”

Roy's gaze turned to exasperation. “Really? After all that? It had to be that day. The theater deal wouldn't have been there forever.”

“Roy, the theater deal wasn't there at all.”

He stared at Hank. Hank stared back as his look of puzzlement slowly, incrementally, dissolved into slack-jawed understanding.

“No…” Roy muttered. “He wouldn't have. There were blueprints. There was the Country Song. The sale was in the works.”

“It was all just a drawing. That's it,” Hank said. “No one has looked at the Country Song building in two years. They were not going to give you a theater. They were going to take their insurance money and boot you out with the rest of the unemployed crew.”

Roy swung his head from side to side, swaying a little in his seat. “No, no, no, no…”

Hank leaned forward and pushed the pictures closer to Roy.

“Now tell me what happened.”

*   *   *

Roy stood outside the dining room and smiled. That tall lawyer had escorted him to the door and said they didn't want him around, that their party had no need of his services. Just as he had hoped. They were local, and they were snobs, so it had seemed a good bet that they wouldn't be interested in his folksy historical spiel. He strolled along the walkway toward the kitchen. The sun was out, but the temperature had fallen since the morning. He had faith that the clouds were just over the horizon.