by Lauren Carr
Tomorrow is David and Chelsea’s wedding rehearsal. Their wedding is the day after that. Or is it?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“That’s great, Ed,” Mac said into his cell phone while the wine steward opened a second bottle of champagne.
Dallas Walker had insisted on treating Mac and David to dinner, which she called “supper,” at the Four Seasons to thank them for their help. Feeling like a fifth wheel, Mac had tried to beg out, claiming that he didn’t want to leave Gnarly alone in their suite, but she’d insisted.
Seeing the evening-theater crowd eating before the show and Dallas grasping David’s thigh under the table, Mac felt not only like a fifth wheel but also like an underdressed fifth wheel. David didn’t look much better with an ugly bruise across his forehead and a welt on his cheek from his encounter with Hopkins’ goons.
At least he’s alive.
In contrast to David’s and Mac’s casual appearance, Dallas had purchased a form-fitting, royal-blue, backless cocktail dress in the hotel dress shop that showed off her long legs, which went on forever. She wore her thick, dark hair in loose waves. In a town full of high-fashion models, Dallas seemed to fit right in. Mac noticed more than one head turn when she walked into the dining room. A look of pride filled David’s face when she arrived at their table and greeted him with a passionate kiss that he enthusiastically returned.
Mac felt his heart sink. Poor Chelsea. It’s happened again. But Mac sensed that Dallas was not Katrina or Yvonne. Dallas was different from all of David’s other women. During their time on the run, they had formed a deep, intense connection built on a mutual dependence on each other. Mac doubted that David had ever had a relationship like the one he was embarking on with Dallas. She was definitely a handful.
David looked at Dallas with the same deep love that Mac looked at Archie with.
Thinking of Archie, Mac wished that she were sitting next to him at their table, enjoying the champagne with them. He felt an ache in his chest when he thought of her not being in his bed when he finished dinner—or was it supper?—and went up to the room.
After disconnecting his call with Ed Willingham, Mac broke through David and Dallas’s heat-filled gaze to deliver another piece of good news. “Jim Wiehl is on his way home. With the dozens of witness statements, including the statements from Lieutenant Van Patton and his detectives, and Preston Blakeley’s phone calls to his influential friends, Jim was released without bond. The district attorney is already discussing charging him with justifiable homicide. He won’t have to spend a day in jail.”
“That’s good.” David picked up his champagne glass. “A toast to the good guys coming out on top.”
After they had all sipped their champagne, Dallas turned to Mac. “What did Wiehl mean when he said he owed my mom?”
Remembering that the Wiehls had said that Audra had insisted no one know about what she’d done to help their daughter, Mac lied. “I think he felt responsible for what happened. He was the executive producer, and he had invited her to be on the show, and—” Feeling himself rambling on, he stopped.
He sensed by the cock of her head that she wasn’t buying it. David was having trouble buying it as well.
“Good champagne.” Changing the subject, Mac set down his glass and turned his attention to David. “I’m impressed. I knew you were good, but three dirty cops? You were tied up, and you managed to free yourself, disarm one of them of his machine gun, and take them all out.”
“Dallas took out one of them.” David squeezed her hand, which was clutching his thigh under the table.
“Still,” Mac said.
“Someone else was there,” David blurted out.
“David,” Dallas warned him in a hushed voice. “She said—”
“I have to tell Mac,” David said. “He’s been after her.”
“Who?” Mac asked.
David reached his hand into his pocket. He then placed the black diamond in the center of the table between them.
Mac almost jumped out of his seat when he grabbed it. “She was there.”
“She was on our side,” Dallas whispered across the table at him.
“Good thing,” Mac said. “From what I know about the Black Diamond, if she hadn’t been, you’d both be dead now.”
“She was protecting Dallas,” David said.
“Why?” Suddenly suspicious, Mac looked her up and down.
Dallas shrugged her shoulders. “I ran into her in the elevator at the Plaza. She recognized me and knew Mom—how, I honestly don’t know. Mom knew a lot of people. Suddenly, she turned up in Long Island. She gunned down those killers. When I asked who she was, she said she owed Mom—kind of like what Jim Wiehl said.”
“Then she gave me this diamond”—David took the black jewel from Mac—“and said I now owe her. She called me by name—”
“David told me that she’s a very infamous paid assassin,” Dallas said. “I don’t understand how my mother would’ve known her.”
“You never saw her before?” Mac asked Dallas.
“Her voice seemed kind of familiar, but I have no—”
“Sleeping with the Enemy,” Mac said.
“What?” David asked.
“The book that put Audra Walker on the map,” Mac said. “She went to jail for ten days because she refused to give up her source.”
Dallas was nodding her head. “I was just a little girl then. Sleeping with the Enemy was ’bout a superior-court judge in Washington State who’d hired a hit man to kill her husband. Mom’s source was the hit man, and the justice department wanted her to name him, but she wouldn’t turn him in.”
“She never did name her source,” Mac said. “Maybe it wasn’t a hit man but a hit woman. That’s why the Black Diamond owed your mother—and saved your lives.”
“I don’t like owing her,” David said. “I don’t care if she did save my life—she’s not getting a free pass in my town.”
“Your mother certainly collected an interesting group of characters and sources.” Mac took a sip of his champagne.
“What put you on the trail of Ryan Ritter?” Dallas asked Mac. “I never would’ve suspected him. I saw him every day for the last five months and totally bought his New England roots.”
“I have a suspicious personality,” Mac said. “First, for someone who wasn’t involved in the case at all, he seemed to be around a lot, voicing his opinion and trying to point us in various directions.”
“He wanted to know how much we knew,” David said.
“And then when he thought he wasn’t on our radar, his ego refused to allow him to simply walk away,” Mac said. “Ritter was too much of a narcissist to miss an opportunity to flaunt his getting away with murder.”
“Okay,” Dallas said. “So Ryan’s behavior put him on your radar but not on mine. I still don’t understand how you managed to connect him to Mom’s Romeo-and-Juliet case.”
Mac shrugged. “He must have had a motive.”
“How ’bout bein’ crazy as a bullbat?”
“Now there’s no such thing as a bullbat,” David said.
“There sure is, sugar,” she replied. “Back home I see ’em every night after dark.”
“Do you mean male bats?” David held out her glass to the server who had returned to refill their glasses.
“No, they’re birds. You probably know them as nighthawks.” After taking a sip of the champagne, she asked Mac, “What clued you in to Ryan Ritter’s connection to Mom’s unfinished book ’bout Romeo and Juliet?”
“Your mother,” Mac said. “Her assistant told me that this whole project was one that she’d never finished. She would only go back to it between bigger projects. And yet suddenly, out of the blue and for the first time, she publicly said it was her next project. Knowing your mother, my guess is that her making that statement on the air was
a signal to the perp that she was on to him.” He sat back in his seat. “Her disappearance meant the killer got that message.”
Slowly, Dallas recalled her mother’s last interview. “Why didn’t you think it was the Wiehls? They were ’bout the same age as Mom and from out West. They said Montana, but they could’ve made all that up like Ritter did.”
“Because your mother had known them for years,” Mac said. “If she was going to suspect them of being Romeo and Juliet, she would have done so much earlier. No, she had her breakthrough that day, and, as it turned out, Ryan Ritter was the only one who met Audra Walker for the first time. To confirm my suspicions, I sent the pictures from your mother’s files—the ones of Clint and Kimberly and all of our other suspects—to Archie so she could run them through a facial-recognition program. Clint had a lot of cosmetic surgery done to change his facial features, but not enough. The program proved I was right. Ryan Ritter and Clint Brown are one and the same.”
Dallas let out a breath. “He killed his Juliet and her brother and the brother’s girlfriend and—”
“Not to mention the young man from the army whose body he dumped at the bottom of the cliff,” Mac interjected, “plus the bartender he enlisted to help him carry out the murders and steal enough money to get out of Texas.”
“And he got away with it for so long,” Dallas said.
“He would still be getting away with it,” David said, “if he hadn’t flaunted it. He just had to show off his complete metamorphosis to your mother so he could get off on getting away with all those murders right under her nose. She recognized him right away.”
“Which forced Ritter to kill again,” Mac said.
Dallas said, “His ego ended up bein’ his fatal flaw.”
“I can see Ritter getting the plastic gun through security’s metal detector,” David said, “but what about the bullets? The police found a metal shell casing in the prop-and-set area.”
“He stole the bullets from Jim Wiehl,” Mac said.
“That’s right. Everyone knows Jim Wiehl is always packin’,” Dallas said.
“Including Ritter,” Mac said. “The murder weapon used the same type of bullets as Jim’s gun. Three-eighty caliber. We took a look at the box of ammunition that he keeps in his office and found some were missing. If the bullets in the murder weapon came from Jim’s box of ammo, forensics will be able to prove it. As it so happens, Wiehl’s office is right next to his wife’s. We believe that Ritter stole the bullets when he used Pam’s desktop to send the visitor’s request for Rubenstein.”
“I still can’t believe he actually planned to slip away out of that crowded make-up department to shoot Yvonne with all those people around and he almost got away with it,” Dallas said. “If I was gonna commit murder, I’d want to do it with no one else around.”
“He was working on the principle of getting lost in a crowd,” David said.
Nodding his head, Mac said, “I once investigated a murder case where a middle-aged woman’s husband had left her for his much younger mistress. The wife decided to host one of those lingerie parties. She had a sales rep, some models, and about thirty women at her house—along with several pitchers of margaritas. Once the show started, the wife stole the keys to one of her friend’s cars, slipped out the back door, and drove to her husband’s mistress’s apartment. When she got there, she went in and shot them both while they were in bed, and then she got back in the car, drove home, and went in through the rear door. She was gone less than thirty minutes, and none of the guests missed her. They all thought she was in the kitchen or the bathroom or something.”
“How’d you catch her?” Dallas asked.
“She was in such a hurry to get back that she ran a red light, and a traffic cam took the car’s picture,” Mac said. “The car’s owner contested the ticket, saying that she was at the party and that she had witnesses. Forensics blew up the picture of the driver behind the wheel, and it was the wife. The picture—and the date and time stamp on it—put her only two blocks from the scene of the murders when she was supposed to be hosting a party.”
Dallas’ mouth dropped open. “Which means that havin’ a party can be a cover-up for murder,” she said in a low voice. “How interestin’.”
“But how did Ritter kill Rubenstein?” David asked.
“That was totally by accident,” Mac said. “Ritter had no reason to kill him. I think he was planning to toss the gun and gloves into the stairwell to frame Rubenstein—not kill him. With a homicide detective in his pocket, he would have had no problem—Hopkins would’ve connected the gun to Rubenstein, who had motive to kill Yvonne. As luck would have it, Gnarly slipped out the door after Rubenstein, and I was right behind Gnarly when Jim Wiehl stopped me at the door.”
“Cutting off Ritter’s escape,” David said. “There he was, in the studio, with the murder weapon on him. Not a good situation. He had to do something, and he had to do it fast, before they locked down the studio.”
“So he decided to slither out the makeup department’s back door,” Dallas said.
“But he needed everyone to leave the makeup department,” Mac said. “Think about it. If he went running in and then out the back door, people would have noticed it. He needed to get everyone’s attention focused on something or someone besides him. How better to clear out a room than to go in and announce that there’s been a murder? Unfortunately for him, he announced that Yvonne had been shot before anyone realized at that point that she had been. As soon as everyone cleared out, he went out the back door, ran around to the stairwell, and tossed the gun.”
“He literally tossed the gun down the stairwell.” David was nodding his head. “It hit a bannister or a step or a wall and discharged, killing Rubenstein.”
“My guess is that Ritter was seconds ahead of me,” Mac said. “After tossing the gun, he hid behind the door when I went into the stairwell and waited for me to get down a couple of flights before taking off the gloves and dropping them. That’s why I didn’t see them. Then he slipped back into the hallway and went around to return to the makeup department through the same door.”
“Was it Ryan Ritter or Lieutenant Hopkins who sicced Officer Tate on me?” Dallas asked.
To answer, Mac turned to David. “Do you remember when we were in the control room and I asked where Ali Hudson was? The assistant director told us that she was at a dental appointment. As soon as Hopkins was through with his interview, Ryan Ritter was on his cell phone. According to the phone logs for the burner we took from Ritter, that call was to Hopkins’ burner phone. They spoke for three minutes. Two minutes later, Hopkins signed out of the lobby.”
“Since you weren’t in the studio, Ritter couldn’t shoot you at the same time he killed Yvonne,” David told Dallas. “You were out of the building and Ritter knew it would be on lockdown. So he called Hopkins to arrange to have one of the Dirty Six get rid of you.”
“That’s why Ritter kept callin’ me all night,” Dallas said. “He was miffed when he saw me the next day--told me that he was worried ’bout me. I thought he was tryin’ to get in my panties.”
“When in reality,” David said, “he was trying to find out where you were so that he could send one of the Dirty Six to kill you.”
“Probably the same snake who took out Detective Roberts,” Dallas said.
With a nod of his head, Mac said, “Van Patton told me that one of Roberts’ neighbors recognized Tate from a photo lineup. The police located what they believe was Tate’s burner. Hopkins had tossed it in a trash bin between the alley and the News Corp building after killing him.”
“Why?” Dallas asked. “Why take out Officer Tate just because he failed to kill me?”
“Tate had been living beyond his means, which had drawn the attention of internal affairs, and he was on suspension,” Mac said. “When you got away, Hopkins must have decided that was the last straw. For a
ll Hopkins knew, you could identify Tate, in which case he could blow Hopkins’ whole operation if he got arrested. Hopkins must have decided to cut his losses and to kill him. The last call on Tate’s burner was to Hopkins.”
“Hopkins’ burner phone also had calls to Ryan Ritter’s burner, as well as phones recovered from the bodies of every one of the Dirty Six,” David said.
“Which ties them all together,” Dallas said.
“Exactly,” Mac said. “Hopkins’ burner is proving to be a treasure trove of information. The call log shows calls to well over a dozen burner phones around the time of a number of crimes that Lieutenant Gibbons suspected to have been connected to the Dirty Six. Internal Affairs suspects they were crimes for hire and Hopkins coordinated them.”
“So Rubenstein seemed to be nothin’ more than a patsy,” Dallas said.
“The news was already out about Rubenstein’s wife’s murder,” David said. “Rubenstein was out front with a news crew, making waves. He was ripe for Ritter to frame for murder.”
Dallas took a sip of her champagne. “Rubenstein may not have shot Yvonne, but I don’t think he was any angel either.”
“How are you able to climb stairs in those high heels?” David asked Dallas while she galloped up the third flight of stairs to the one-bedroom apartment they’d managed to find in Brooklyn.
After dinner, Dallas, who wanted to check out a hunch about Ruth Rubenstein’s murder, insisted that David and Mac take a cab with her to the apartment of Polly Langley. Once again, Mac tried to beg out, claiming that Gnarly would be lonely. Saying that his expertise as a homicide detective would be essential to her proving her theory, Dallas refused to take no for an answer.
After Dallas knocked on the apartment door, a plump middle-aged woman answered it. Her eyes opened wide upon seeing Dallas in her royal-blue cocktail dress and high heels, carrying an evening bag.
“Is Polly Langley here?” Dallas made no pretense of not trying to see into the small apartment.
