“Wait here while I go get a coffee, little boy,” I said as the next client and her defender shuffled their way up to the tables before the judge. I gave Thad one last look as I turned to walk out of the courtroom.
That’s when I saw his attacker approaching.
Chapter 3
I’d seen the brief of evidence against Thad Forrester, including the photographs of his victim he’d taken with his phone. Constance Jones’s wide mouth and heart-shaped face were obviously a product of her father, a man I recognized now striding toward me up the courtroom’s center aisle. At first I thought that, like the parents of so many victims over the years, he was coming for me. It’s not uncommon for me to get berated for providing assistance of counsel to the young killers, rapists, thugs, and creeps of the Watkins region outside Denver. But one look in Mr. Jones’s cold, hard eyes told me exactly where he was going. Constance’s father was heading for Thad, and as I let my eyes fall from his face, I noticed a bulge at his hip.
Most people think you can’t get a gun into a courtroom in the US unless you’re a cop, a bailiff, or a US Marshal. Anyone who’s spent enough time in courthouses, however, knows there are a thousand ways to do it if you’re determined enough, if something has inspired you with enough icy fury to get the job done. You could sneak the gun in through the air-conditioning vents on the rooftop or mix it with equipment used by the thousands of workers who service the building throughout the year—plumbers, electricians, cleaners, painters, audio technicians, and repair crews. Hell, you could send it in on a coffee-and-sandwich cart while the vendor is out taking a leak. However Mr. Jones had done it, I realized I was the only thing standing between him and his vengeance. He was about to barge past me, his shoulder connecting with mine, when—
Freeze-frame.
Time locked in place.
It was only a fragment of a second, yet I spent incalculable moments suspended between two places. Was it ever all right to let violence go on unchecked, no matter who was committing the act or why? I knew Thad was guilty of inhumane acts. It hadn’t been art. It hadn’t been a protest. It hadn’t been youthful foolishness. In some ways there was only one true punishment for it, and if I just let events proceed, I would be allowing that punishment to take place.
I made my decision. I spun as Mr. Jones shoved past me and launched myself toward him, barreling into his back. He was a big man, but I was bigger. We slammed onto the courtroom carpet together. I heard a wave of gasps and yowls of surprise all around us. Mr. Jones reached for his gun, and I grabbed the hand that was reaching as he squeezed off a bullet, our fingers mutually scrabbling for the weapon, the shot smacking harmlessly into the ceiling above us.
I ripped the gun from his hand and threw it aside, then sucker punched him as he tried to roll underneath me. When he doubled over, I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back.
“Bailiff!” I cried, looking up. Everyone in the big room had frozen, including a group of bailiffs near the row of defendants. “Little help here?”
They rushed to my assistance. I handed off to them a sweating, swearing Mr. Jones, protesting, “He raped my daughter! That boy raped my daughter!”
I stood watching as the courtroom guards dragged the furious father away. Someone handed me the gun I had gotten away from him, as though in confiscating it I had claimed responsibility for it.
Thad Forrester was laughing his head off. I realized my finger was resting gently on the weapon’s trigger. All I had to do to stop that evil laughter was point, aim, and shoot.
Instead I handed the gun to one of the bailiffs.
My phone rang in my pocket. I walked out, ignoring the uncomfortable congratulations I caught on my way. I waited until I was outside the courtroom to pull the device from the pocket of my torn blazer.
“Hello?”
“Uh, is this Rhonda Bird?”
“It is. What do you want?” I said more sharply than intended. I realized the hand holding my phone was shaking.
“I’m calling about your father, Ms. Bird,” the voice said, obviously cowed by my tone. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, but he’s dead.”
Chapter 4
He couldn’t look at her. That’s what scared him.
Jacob stood at the windows of his daughter’s hospital room and gazed out at the parking lot, watching nurses arriving for the morning shift, toting coffees and chattering happily as they exited their vehicles. He saw a man in a blue sedan skid to a halt in the emergency parking bay, leap out of the vehicle, and run to the passenger-side door to help his heavily pregnant wife waddle in to triage. Jacob tried to focus on the activity outside because he couldn’t look at his daughter, Beatrice, lying stiff in the bed behind him.
All her life, he’d spent every possible minute watching her. Those early days when she would sleep on his chest, her full lips moving in dream, her tiny hand gripping his shirt. Watching her had always been his greatest joy, but now he feared what he saw would be the last memory of her burned into his brain.
And it was all his fault.
The doctor and Neina were sitting on the edge of Beaty’s bed. They always sit with you when it’s bad news, Jacob thought. It was as if by sitting they were telling you they had an extra moment just for you, before some other crisis drew them away, because this patient was special. As though doctors didn’t deal in death the way garbage collectors deal with used kitty litter and bags of diapers.
“The severe asthma attack caused respiratory failure that starved Beatrice’s brain completely of oxygen for a very dangerous period,” the doctor was saying now behind Jacob. “Essentially, to protect itself, the organ shut down. We’re not getting any brain activity showing up on our scans. But that doesn’t mean—”
“She’s brain dead?” Neina’s voice was quivering. “Is that what you’re saying? How do you know that?”
“She’s not brain dead. We can’t rule that out, but we’re not ruling it in either. Not enough time has passed for us to…Look, Mr. and Mrs. Kanular, you need to maintain hope. The best think you can do for your daughter is to be here with her, talking to her, letting her know you are a united front.”
Jacob turned away from the window. He went and gathered his wife into his arms. He said words he didn’t believe. “We’re gonna get through this, Neina. All three of us. We’re going to be fine. She’ll come back to us, I promise.”
When Jacob had found Neina, when he’d decided to marry her and have a child, he’d wanted only the best for her and the baby. The big house. The fancy cars. Vacations in the Bahamas. It had all been for them. For years he’d traveled the world with only what he could carry in a bag. He’d done bad things in those years. Caused a lot of pain. A thought pushed at him, that the things he had done during those years had caused this. That this was his punishment.
But no. He gripped his wife tightly. Punishment was something you submitted to. He finally looked at Beaty in the bed. She was fighting her way back from the darkness. He knew it. He’d fight too.
When the doctor left, Jacob put the first step of his plan into action.
“Neinie,” he said. “We’re not going to report the break-in to the police.”
She stared up at him, her mouth falling open. “What?”
“We’re going to tell them Beaty had a nightmare, that she woke and the asthma attack was already upon her. It worsened as we drove to the hospital. We won’t mention the home invasion.”
“How can you…” Neina was lost for words. “Are you insane? These monsters attacked us! They nearly killed our child, Jake!”
“Listen to me,” he said. “These attackers were highly sophisticated. They knew what they were doing. They cut the power, bypassed security. This wasn’t their first time. If we bring in the police now, we might be inviting more trouble.”
“Jake, are you kidding me?”
“Neina, there were five of them. The cops aren’t going to catch them all at once. If we leave even one of them out ther
e, running loose, they’ll come for us.”
“Jake—”
“Just stay here with Beaty. I’ll handle it.”
He tightened his grip on her arms. Not painfully. Just enough to let her feel his certainty, his determination. She could trust him to make them safe. She’d always been able to do that.
Neina nodded, and Jacob held her to him again.
At the house, he stood in his kitchen, looking at the big black streak the fire had left on the wall behind the four-burner stove. They’d tossed an aerosol can of something in there while they trashed the place. The sprinkler system had kicked in, dousing everything. His boots crunched over broken glass and ceramics as he made his way to the stairs and down to the ground floor. He crossed the lavish game room, skirting around the full-size pool table, and took the stairs by the bar down to the basement. The wide space was home to a few boxes, Beaty’s bike, a treadmill Neina never used. There was a large desk, where he had drawn up the plans for the ornate jewelry box he was making for Beaty’s birthday. The box was half assembled at the community-college woodshop, where he spent his days as a volunteer teacher. He’d hoped it would be a much-loved item, something she could hand down to her children. He didn’t know if that was going to be possible now. He went to a large wine rack on the east wall and flipped a hidden switch, and the rack slid sideways to reveal a narrow alcove.
The smell hit him first. Gun oil, and the weird musty scent of used bank notes. In the alcove, stacks of unmarked bills bound in elastic bands reached knee height, consuming the floor space beneath the lowest of several wall shelves. On the shelf above the hoard of cash lay his passports and personal papers, and a battered old laptop that contained information to make the FBI’s counterterrorism squad believe all their Christmases had come at once. Beside the laptop was a torn and dusty backpack. That tattered black backpack had accompanied him to Madrid, Belfast, Sydney, Honolulu.
Jacob reached for the second shelf, where, along with a few other weapons, the Barrett M82 sniper rifle he had used on his last job lay patiently waiting, as though it had known all this time that he wasn’t done with his old life. He hadn’t lined a man up in the crosshairs in twenty years, hadn’t taken a job to kill business or political rivals, ex-lovers or friends, despised public figures or criminal adversaries, in every corner of the globe. In all that time, he hadn’t watched a placid, unassuming face in the sunlight become red mist spraying all over the steps of some church or the front windows of a café. But the time had come to kill again.
Jacob picked up the gun and loaded it.
Chapter 5
Twenty-five years. That was how long it had been since I’d seen or spoken to my father. I walked away from the courtroom in a daze, through the bustling courthouse halls and to the parking lot. I forgot all about Thad Forrester and Constance Jones’s father, and the murder attempt I’d just thwarted. In a space toward the back of the lot, my lovingly restored 1972 Buick Skylark with a realistic hand-painted leopard-print paint job bulged from the tiny space allotted for it, its big square bumper hanging well out over the adjacent sidewalk. I unlocked and climbed into the car, making the suspension sing.
“Are you still there?” the voice asked.
“I’m here. This is…” I fumbled for words, gripped the steering wheel with one hand, phone still pressed to my ear. “Wow. Wow. What happened?”
“Heart attack in his office. His health was not at premium levels.”
An image of my father from two and a half decades earlier flashed. The fixed chandelier of blue-gray cigar smoke hanging from his office ceiling, ash on every surface. The bottle of whiskey and chipped crystal glass on the edge of the table, take-out wrappers crunched down in the trash can under pill containers and bottles of Pepto Bismol. The place had always looked like a tornado had swept through it, depositing betting slips for horse or greyhound races everywhere.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch your name. Or who the hell you are.”
“I’m Ira Abelman, your father’s attorney.” I heard papers being shuffled. “Ms. Bird, I’m going to have to ask you to come to Los Angeles to see about Earl’s estate.”
“Oh, believe me, you can wrap it up without me being there,” I said, suddenly and undeniably grounded in the situation. “I’d be absolutely stunned if he’s left me anything. But if he has, just donate it to a charity of your choice.”
I took the phone away from my ear, made a move to hang up, strangely angry with the lawyer for delivering the message. His voice stopped me.
“Ms. Bird, you are absolutely required here in Los Angeles.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s essential that you attend a meeting at my office at your earliest convenience.”
“I know what ‘required’ means, you jackass,” I said. “Why am I required there?”
There was a silence. My stomach sank.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Let me guess. He’s riddled with debt, and I’ll have to be there because it has all fallen to me. I’m his only living relative so I’ll have to assume the liability. How much is it?”
Still no answer.
“Are we talking tens of thousands?” My mouth was bone dry. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars?”
“Ms. Bird, I’ve been instructed to explain everything only once you arrive here in person,” Abelman said.
I covered my eyes, felt suddenly crushingly exhausted, the last time I had seen my father turning over in my mind. I’d been thirteen, sitting in a big car like the one I now owned, squashed against the door by his bulk. I’d been excited. My parents’ divorce had been rough. My father had packed his bags and walked out one cold, snowy night and left my mother to explain to me that Earl had picked up a girlfriend in California on his latest business trip and he was leaving us for her. When my father called and asked me to go out for coffee with him two weeks later, I’d been buzzed. It seemed wonderfully adult to be going out for coffee alone with my father. In my mind, we were going to bond, to drill down and discuss it all, to look each other in the eye across the table in a diner and negotiate our new, exciting future together as Daughter and Divorced Dad. He was going to give me the real story about this supposed girlfriend. He was going to tell me he was renting a cool new apartment in downtown Denver and I could come hang out with him there whenever I wanted. I would wave good-bye to my mother, climb into the car, and smile broadly at my unusually tanned father as we headed for town.
We hadn’t gone for coffee. He’d driven me to the town courthouse, where he’d had a notary witness me signing over some stocks he had held in my name. After he’d reclaimed the stocks, he’d dropped me back home, and I never saw or heard from him again.
Something was pressing at me now, an instinct I couldn’t deny.
“Something’s wrong here,” I said. “This feels like a trap.”
There was a small sigh on the line, like the lawyer had been caught out. When he spoke again, his tone was sympathetic. It was the voice of a man who had dealt with my father for a long time and was as worn down by the experience as I was.
“You’ll understand everything when you get here,” Abelman said.
“I’m coming,” I told him.
Chapter 6
It didn’t take long for Jacob to figure out who his attackers were once he had locked back into hunter mode.
As a young man, he’d wandered from job to job, his senses ticking all the time as he moved, feeling his way forward. Every interaction was a puzzle to be picked over, every face a mask of clues. Did the woman at the hotel counter recognize him from an Interpol alert? Was the man across the café an FBI agent surveilling him while fellow agents assembled? Every time he got off a plane, he’d wondered if officers were about to pounce. Every time he accepted a job, he’d considered the possibility that it had come from an undercover operative trying to set him up. It had been a long time since Jacob had employed such heightened awareness of himself and his movements, but it was easy to resume the
behavior. Being a killer and fugitive was like riding a bike. The muscles remembered.
He walked now through the bustling shopping mall toward the security office, past brightly lit stores pumping out techno music. He was sure he was on the right track as he followed the signs overhead to a narrow hall between a juice bar and a sushi place. A group of elderly mall walkers passed him, with heavy tans and wearing bright athletic suits, little dumbbells gripped in withered fists. The mezzanine café was crowded with daytime shoppers taking a break between stores, piles of shopping bags at their feet. Jacob clocked every face, noted when his glance was returned. He felt like a fox creeping through night fields, into the henhouses where dozy chickens slumbered.
In his retirement, Jacob lived a quiet life. Too quiet, to the trained eye. He had the volunteer job at the local community college, teaching trade skills and joinery to young people. He’d learned carpentry while stalking a target for six months in Alaska on a rare long-term job. He didn’t stop to chat with the other fathers when he dropped Beaty at school, making like he was shy. People probably figured he was self-conscious about being one of the older dads. He passed politely on dinner-party invitations, didn’t return friendly calls or texts. He didn’t borrow tools from his neighbors, didn’t stop to chat at the grocery store, didn’t have golfing buddies, fishing buddies, or buddies of any kind. He let Neina attend functions alone, making excuses for him, and while she had complained in the early years, his persistence had paid off. After a while she had stopped trying to push him. He went through life offending no one and befriending no one, someone purposefully difficult to remember, a smudge at the edge of a picture.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 2
