The Constantine Conspiracy (24 page)

“No.”

“That’s surprising. Did you ever see it?”

“No, come to think of it.”

“So you’re taking Ms. Bridge’s word about its contents.” Rick shrugged, the point having escaped him until this moment.

Pops chuckled. “Ms. Bridge makes a weak case, seems to me. My theory—and I confess it’s without basis—seems as plausible as hers.”

Rick balanced all the possibilities, but none of them pleased him. After all he’d endured, he felt no closer to finding the truth about his dad’s killer than when he started.

“I tell you what, Rick,” Pops said. “I have to go to New York for a couple of days, some pressing business. You stay here, keep a low profile. When you feel like it, look around all you want. Search my house, offices, rooms, computers, anywhere you want. You find something you don’t understand, you ask me, I’ll explain it, nothing hidden. I want you to trust me— you’re all I have, you and your mom, so sad about her.”

He moved to Rick and stood by the bed. “Get some rest, Son,” he said. “You must be bone weary. Take a few days to sleep. Then test me for as long and as thoroughly as you want, I’d welcome that.”

Rick’s eyes filled and he felt so tired. He did need rest, days and days of sleep, time to heal. His dad’s death seemed so far away. Nothing that had happened since then made sense, all of it a blur, one unreal moment heaped on top of another. He wanted to cry, he realized, close his eyes and curl up in the center of his bed and cry; cry for his mom whom he’d neglected for too many years, cry for his dad whom he’d never see again, and cry for himself for all his failures.

He thought of Shannon and hoped she was wrong about Pops. Although he’d not mentioned the Order, if Pops did lead a murderous conspiracy, then she was in terrible danger. A man who’d murder his son-in-law wouldn’t hesitate to kill a woman who dared to name him as the murderer.

Rick’s eyes watered and Pops patted his hand as he let the tears loose. If Shannon was right, then Pops was a killer and he was alone, and together that made his tears inevitable—a painful but required release to protect him from a shattered heart.

28

A
monitor beeped by a hospital bed in the intensive care unit in the Helena Medical Center, and Gerald Grimes opened his eyes for the first time since being shot. Tubes ran into both his arms and his throat felt like someone had dragged glass shards through it. The smell of cleaning solution hung in the air, and he cautiously lifted an arm and scratched his nose, then shifted his gaze to the window to his right and saw what looked like midday light shining through outside. He tried to rise but couldn’t manage it, so he relaxed back into his pillow and closed his eyes again. A few seconds later he heard movement and looked up to see the door open and his mom walk in. He lifted a hand to greet her and she shrieked and ran to him.

“You’re awake!” she howled. “Awake!” She planted a big kiss on his cheek. “I knew you’d make it,” she celebrated. “No matter what the doctor said, I believed in you, Gerald.”

He smiled weakly as his mom picked up a cup of water and held it to his lips. He sipped for a couple of seconds but swallowing hurt too much, so he waved away the cup and his mom took half a step back.

“Oh,” she said suddenly. “Your dad, I have to call him.” She jerked a cell from her purse and punched a number.

Gerald licked his lips, felt them cracked and dry. He tried to speak but no words formed. His mom sobbed her good news to his dad, then hung up and faced him again as she wiped away tears.

“He’s on the way! Here in fifteen minutes.”

He nodded lightly, closed his eyes. “What happened to me, Mom?” he asked, his voice scratchy, barely audible. “I don’t remember a thing.”

“Somebody shot you, police are still searching for the shooter.”

“I was shot?”

“Yes, almost killed. Another minute for the EMTs to reach you and you were a goner. But you’re good now, awake, going to do fine.”

Gerald tried to remember the minutes before the shooting. “I went to lunch,” he said, vaguely recalling the day.

“In the park,” his mom said. “By the bench you like so much.”

He knew the spot. “I probably ate tuna,” he said. “Like almost every day.”

His mom smiled and held up the water cup again. He drank more from it this time, then waved it away.

“Why would anybody shoot you?” she asked softly, her tone suggesting she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask the question. “You fool around with a married woman or something?”

He smiled at her attempt at humor, both of them knowing he’d never do such a thing. “Not sure,” he said, trying to remember. “My work in the crime lab, maybe related to that.” His voice improved a little as he talked.

“But what case?” she asked. “Where was the danger?”

Gerald focused on the hours before the shooting, filtered through his mind all the cases he was handling. Shannon Bridge, he remembered, the whole deal with Steve Carson. “What day is it, Mom?” he asked.

“Saturday.”

He tried to rise again, but his mom pushed him down. “My phone,” he said. “I need my phone.”

“In the cabinet,” said his mom, tilting her head toward the corner. “You promise to stay horizontal, I’ll get it for you.”

“Done.”

She stepped to the cabinet, opened it, and hauled his phone back to him, flipped it open. “Who you want called?” she asked. “I’ll do it for you.”

“A text message,” he said. “Check drafts.”

His mom fingered the phone, then pulled up a message directed to Shannon Bridge.

“I remember her,” she said. “You went out with her a couple of times, right?”

Grimes nodded. “Friends, Mom, we were just friends.”

“‘GlobeFree, Bahamas’?” she asked, obviously puzzled as she read the text message.

He nodded. “Hand it to me.”

“What’s the urgency?”

“Just hand me the phone, please, Mom.”

She handed over the phone and he checked the message, then clicked options. A second later, he hit Send and the message departed. Then he turned off the phone, handed it to his mom, and lay back on his pillow again, his heart content. No matter if Shannon never went out with him, he’d done all he could for her.

“Rick Carson,” he whispered, suddenly weary again.

“What about him?”

“They find him yet?”

“What do you care? You working on that case?”

“Did they find him, Mom?”

“Yeah, he turned himself in earlier today, in Atlanta. No charges though. Whoever shot you connected to all that?”

Gerald closed his eyes, not wanting to say more but also not wanting to be rude to his mom. “Food,” he said. “I could eat something.”

“You bet, just a second.”

He opened his eyes and his mom backed up and cleared out of the room. Weary from talking, he shut his eyes again. A minute later he heard the door open, light footsteps crossing the room. Too tired to look up, he lifted a hand in greeting and a man gently took it and rubbed his palm.

“Dad?”

Gerald opened his eyes and saw a slender stranger standing over him, a smallish man with ears like Frisbees wearing nurse’s scrubs. The man held a needle and Gerald sensed the danger before the man moved. He jerked upward, his body convulsing in pain but still reacting. His right hand grabbed the man’s face and dug into his flesh, but the man pushed him away, lifted the needle, and plunged it into Gerald’s neck. Gerald punched at the man, but his blows missed and his arms felt heavy. The man pushed liquid from the needle into Gerald’s neck.

Gerald’s eyes blinked, blinked, blinked, and then stilled. This time he didn’t think of Shannon, didn’t think of food, didn’t think of anything but peace—blessed, blissful peace.

Housed in a respectable older hotel about five miles from the Carson Estate, Shannon did two quick things after she received the text from Gerald. First, she forwarded the message to the Order’s research department in Colorado Springs, where experts immediately went to work to find the owner of the motorcycle. If she could trace GlobeFree to Augustine, then she could connect him that much closer to Steve Carson’s death, thus giving her more ammunition to convince Rick of his granddad’s guilt. Next she placed a call to Gerald but got no answer. Later, she told herself, she’d try him again later.

She flipped on the television and tuned to the news. Two stories battled for top billing. Rick’s return home—bullet wound and all—claimed attention from entertainment reporters focused on the seriousness of his injury to talk show hosts debating the ongoing search for a killer. In addition to Rick’s situation, the cameras pointed at images of the Supreme Court building where the court’s only female justice had just died after a speech to a group of corporate lawyers. One of the liberal justices, said the reporter currently on screen; a death that wouldn’t change the current makeup of the court because the president, elected on a pledge to appoint what he called “judges with a heart,” would appoint someone of similar judicial philosophy to fill the seat.

After a few minutes, Shannon flipped off the television, walked to the window, and stared in the direction of Rick’s home. She worried about him, what he had said to his granddad, if he’d told him what she said. If so, Augustine knew about her, which made her vulnerable.

She stepped to her bed, opened her backpack and pulled out her Sig Sauer. Although she and her allies preferred not to kill, they did believe in self-protection and killed if and when necessary. She slipped the weapon into the waistband of her khaki slacks and moved back to the window, grateful for the training she’d done in the past five years, the skills she’d acquired, the dangers she’d faced. Nothing scared her anymore, nothing but the thought that someone else would suffer like her family had before she gained the proficiencies she now enjoyed. “Never again,” she vowed as she did each night before she went to bed, as she said her prayers to the God in whom she believed, “never again” would someone she loved suffer if she had the power to stop it.

She pushed away the memories that threatened to overwhelm her, memories that hung on in spite of her efforts to squash them. No good, she knew; the guilt that chewed at her gut, the anguish and regret. God forgave, she reminded herself; grace cleansed her of all her sins. Yet, still, it hurt, her mistakes, her errors, her failings. People died—people she loved, people who depended on her. Never again, she vowed once more, never again.

They’d eventually come for her, she knew that. And she’d be ready this time when they did.

“Come on,” she whispered through the window. “Come on, let me earn my revenge. I’ll ask God’s forgiveness later. Come on.”

29

Sunday morning

S
tanding in a vaulted room buried six stories beneath his New York office tower in Manhattan, Augustine pulled a fresh cigar from his silver carton as he talked with Charbeau by video.

“We finished preliminary research on Shannon Bridge,” Charbeau said. “And it ain’t pretty.”

“She’s with the Order, right?”

“Since about two years ago.”

“Where’d they find her?”

“Military intelligence in the Pentagon. Her dad a career man before her, a three-star general in the Air Force before his retirement, an instructor at the Academy. She served in Iraq with Special Forces; good with all the gadgets, computers and crap like that. Weapons too, skydiving. She kept watch on the renegade militias, not a lady to take lightly.”

“How’d she end up in the Order, then out in Montana?”

“Not clear on that, we’ll have to ask her when we bring her in. But she wasn’t always such a Jesus fan, lived on the dark side her last year of college. One bust for drug possession at the University of Colorado, did a little weed apparently— typical college stuff. Rumors of a couple of other things that we’re still checking out.”

“What about her mother?”

“The woman in Florida is her aunt, not her momma.”

“The aunt in the Order also?”

“Not that we’ve found, but she is a Bible thumper and real close to Ms. Bridge.”

Augustine lit his cigar and puffed it to life. “Did Miss Bridge take her religion from her parents?”

“Yeah, the dad in particular. He carried a lot of influence in his time at the Academy. That’s a hotbed of Christian types.”

“I am aware. We funded many of those who complained of the evangelistic efforts of the chaplains there.”

“Bridge’s dad gave leadership to much of that. After he retired, he got involved in speaking in churches, July 4th events, Memorial and Veterans Days. You may remember him, showed up on our radar there for a while, then things calmed down.”

“I do recall, now that you mention it. So Ms. Bridge spent time in the wilderness of sin, then turned back to the faith, got gloriously saved. Now she follows her father’s formidable footsteps.”

“Looks like it.”

A sharp pain suddenly cut through Augustine’s chest, and he waited for it to settle, then focused on Charbeau again. “When did Ms. Bridge take up with Jesus?”

“Near the end of her senior year of college. Details are a little cloudy, but she broke down sometime that year; not exactly a mental collapse, but she definitely went through a bad patch, ended up in a hospital. Took to the faith soon after that, then she’s in the military, then with the Order after five years of service.”