by Tami Hoag
“We’ll be in the landfill. Leonard will have us killed.”
Kovac moved to the last of the drums and scanned as much as he could see of the yard. No sign of Gaines, which meant he could have taken refuge in any one of the buildings on the property and they could end up with a standoff situation. Then suddenly the angry buzz of a small motor split the air, and there was no time to think.
The snowmobile burst out the end door of Neil Fallon’s work shed, roaring straight for Kovac. Kovac planted his feet and squeezed off a shot, hitting the nose of the machine, then dove out of the way, rolled, and came up running.
Gaines had the throttle wide-open, heading for the lake, heading for the open area to the east of the ice fishing houses. The machine bucked hard over wind-packed drifts. Kovac ran after it, hoping just to keep Gaines in sight. He squeezed off two shots on the run with no real hope of hitting anything.
The snowmobile hit the bank and flew, Gaines coming up off the seat. The machine twisted out from beneath him in midair, ass-end dropping down, Gaines still hanging on to the handlebars.
Kovac ran harder. He could see Liska coming on his left.
The snowmobile hit the ice on end, driving into it. The sound of the lake’s surface breaking was like a crack of thunder. Gaines landed beside the machine and went still for an instant.
“Watch the ice! Watch the ice!” Liska shouted as Kovac ran down the length of the old boat dock.
Gaines was already shaking off the impact, struggling to get to his feet, the backpack strapped around his shoulders. The snowmobile was going down, the ice around the point of impact cracking and popping. Another pop and the machine was gone.
“Give it up, Gaines!” Kovac shouted. “There’s nowhere to go!”
Gaines came up with the gun and pulled off another round. Kovac dropped flat to the dock. Gaines’s scream brought his head back up.
“He’s in the water!” Liska yelled.
Gaines made a strangled squealing sound, one arm flailing above the surface. Kovac stepped off the dock, testing the ice.
“Hang on, Gaines! Don’t move!”
But Gaines was in panic mode, bobbing down in the water, then coming up and attempting to throw himself out of the hole, only breaking more ice and sending himself under again.
Kovac got down on all fours, spreading his weight over more of the surface, moving toward the crumbling edge inches at a time.
“Gaines! Don’t fight!” he shouted.
He could hear Gaines gasping, wheezing. The water temperature would send the body into shock quickly, shutting systems down. The weight of wet clothing would pull at him like a suit of armor. The backpack would be like an anvil strapped to his shoulders. His muscles would cramp and the panic would worsen.
“Let me grab your arm!” Kovac yelled, reaching out. Beneath his body he could hear the ice cracking.
Instead of allowing Kovac to take hold of him, Gaines clawed at him wildly but couldn’t catch hold, couldn’t grip. Another few inches of ice gave way and an animal sound of fear wrenched out of him.
“Hold still! Goddammit! Hold still!” Kovac screamed.
He focused on Gaines’s arm and lunged forward, grabbing hold. The ice beneath his chest gave way, and his upper body went face-first into the water.
The cold was so intense, it was like hitting a brick wall at full speed. Instinctively, he beat at the water with his hands, as if it were solid and he could push himself up against it. He felt Gaines’s hands on him, pushing him, pulling him, trying to drag him in. Another force pulled at him from behind, anchoring his legs, pulling him backward.
Kovac jerked his head back, came up coughing, choking, kicking, trying to scuttle backward to gain safer ice.
“Sam!” Liska shouted.
She was behind him, flat on the ice, still hanging on to one of his legs. Kovac went still. His fingers were already half numb with cold. Coughing, choking on the water he’d taken in, he stared at the hole in the ice.
Gaines was gone. The water was still and black in the moonlight.
For just an instant Kovac flashed on what drowning would be like: that brief instant beneath the water, blind, trying to come up for air and feeling nothing but ice above your head.
Then he closed the door on that part of his mind and crawled back toward the dock.
38
CHAPTER
“AND YOU THINK I’m ambitious,” Liska said. “I’ve never actually murdered anyone for career advancement.”
They sat together in Kovac’s car. The SO units had made the scene and Tippen was walking them through. One of the deputies had loaned Kovac a dry sweater. He’d borrowed a filthy hunting coat from Neil Fallon’s workshop to put over it. The sleeves came halfway up his forearms, and it smelled like a wet dog.
“You’ve talked about it,” Kovac said. Someone had brought coffee. He drank it without tasting the coffee or the scotch Tippen had come up with.
“That doesn’t count.”
They were silent for a moment.
“How much do you think Wyatt knows?” Liska asked.
Kovac shook his head. “I don’t know. He has to suspect by now. It all goes back to Thorne. He sure as hell knows everything about that night.”
“And it’s been a secret all these years.”
“Until Andy Fallon started digging around. That must have been what Mike was talking about when he said he couldn’t forgive Andy for what he was doing, that Andy had ruined everything, that he’d told Andy just to let it go. I thought he was talking about Andy coming out. . . . Jesus, all these years.”
“You think Wyatt killed Thorne?” Liska asked.
“That’s where I end up. Evelyn Thorne was in love with him.”
“But how would Gaines have found out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Andy had made the same connection and said something to Gaines. Maybe he’d seen Andy’s notes. I don’t know.”
“Where does the guy who got pinned for the murder fit in?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a hell of a lot of story to what happened that night all those years ago, Kovac thought. Aside from Ace Wyatt, there was one other person living who might be able to tell it. Amanda.
“You want to talk to Wyatt alone?” Liska asked. “I’ll ride along if you need me—”
“No,” he murmured. “I need to do it. For Mike. Whatever else he was, he meant something good to me once.”
Liska nodded. “I’ll go back to the office, then get a jump on the paperwork for this adventure.”
“Why don’t you go home, Tinks? It’s late.”
“The boys are staying with my mother because of Rubel. I got nothing to go home to but a radio car with a couple of assholes sitting in my driveway.”
“No word on Rubel yet?”
“Lots of tips. Lots of false alarms. I hope something flushes him out, if he hasn’t blown for Florida by now.”
“Are you scared?” Kovac asked, looking at her.
She met his gaze and nodded. “Yes. For myself. For the boys. I just have to keep thinking we’ll get him first.”
They fell silent again.
“I feel really old, Tinks,” Kovac said at last. “Tired.”
“Don’t think about it, Sam,” she advised. “If you stop moving long enough to think about it, you won’t get up again.”
“That’s cheery.”
“Hey, I’ve lost my shot at a career in Hollywood,” she said with a false scowl. “What do you want from me? Mary Fucking Sunshine?”
He found enough energy to chuckle, then coughed. His lungs still hurt from the cold water.
“Hey.” Liska reached across and patted his cheek. “I’m really glad Gaines didn’t kill you, partner.”
“Thanks. Thanks for saving my life, partner. I could have been under that ice with him.”
“That’s what friends are for,” she said simply, and got out of the car.
SOMEHOW, EVEN IN the middle of the night, all l
egal on-street parking spaces around city hall were taken. Liska pulled into the emergency zone smack in front of the building and left it there. The hell if she was parking in a ramp tonight.
She was secretly glad for the chance to come back to the office. She had always liked being here at night, while most of the city was asleep. Tonight it beat going home. If she went home, she would have too much quiet time to think about the sorry state of her personal life, too much time to miss the boys.
The hallways were quiet. The feds had set the Rubel task force in their own building on Washington Avenue. The action would be there tonight.
She paused in front of the door to the IA offices, thinking how strange the circles of life could be. A week before, she would have spat on the ground at the mention of Internal Affairs. In a matter of days she had seen enough bad cops to last her a lifetime.
No one noticed her as she went into the CID offices. Maybe she would just stay the night, she thought as she stowed her purse in the drawer, sleep in the space under her desk, like the homeless people who sought out hiding places in the skyway system after everything had closed.
She clicked the computer on, turned to take her coat off . . . and found Derek Rubel standing at the end of the cubicle, holding a gun.
“TELL THE STORY. From the beginning.”
The room was so quiet, Savard could feel the silence as a pressure against her eardrums.
Wyatt sat behind his desk, staring at her, staring at her gun. She had placed a small tape recorder on the desk in front of him. They were in his home. Just the two of them. Wyatt had married once in the years since the night of Bill Thorne’s murder. It hadn’t lasted.
“Tell the story,” she insisted. “Don’t waste my tape.”
He looked hurt. “Amanda . . . why are you doing this?”
“Andy Fallon is dead. Mike Fallon is dead.”
“I didn’t kill them,” he said.
“All these years,” she whispered. “All these years, I couldn’t tell . . . because of Mother. Because of what she did that night. That man was already dead. I couldn’t save him. I thought I could make it up somehow, make it right some other way . . .”
For a long time she had let herself believe that was penance enough: stopping other bad cops from hurting people. Keeping the dirty secret of her family, the dirty secret of the family of cops her father had been a part of. At the same time, she dedicated her life to breaking the secrets of the people in the MPD, not allowing the cops in her department to get away with what Bill Thorne had gotten away with, with what Ace Wyatt had done.
Wyatt had done his own penance. But it hadn’t mattered. Her father was still dead . . . except in her nightmares. Weagle was still dead . . . except in her nightmares. Now Andy . . . Now Mike Fallon . . .
“I can’t live with all these corpses in my head,” she said, voice quavering. She made a motion with the gun. “You tell the story. Tell it now.”
“Amanda . . .”
His voice was like a razor on her nerves: condescending, patronizing. She shifted the gun two inches to the right and put a bullet into the wall behind his head.
“I said tell the story!” she screamed.
Wyatt went white, then red. Sweat ran down his face. The strong ammonia smell of urine burned the air.
“I . . . can’t . . . take . . . this . . . any . . . more,” she said through her teeth. There was a part of her brain that recognized her behavior as irrational. But then, that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? She had been too rational, too practical for too long, suppressing the horror, the fear, the knowledge that what had happened was wrong and that she could have stopped it all.
“I’ll begin for you,” she offered, then announced herself and the date and the place, beginning the tape in the way she would any police interview. She introduced the subject, stated the date of the incident. Wyatt stared at her.
“I loved your mother,” he said. “What I did, I did for her, to protect her. You know that, Amanda.”
Tears filled her eyes. “She’s protecting herself now. No one can hurt her. I can’t let any more people die and not do anything about it. That’s wrong. I became a cop to keep that from happening. Do you understand that? Because of that night, I am what I am. I became a cop to police the police, so what happened that night wouldn’t happen to someone else. But then it did.”
“I didn’t kill them, Amanda. Andy. Mike. I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did. Don’t you see? Tell the story.”
“They killed themselves,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice. He couldn’t even tell the lie to himself.
Tears rolled down Wyatt’s face. He was shaking visibly. He looked at the tape recorder, probably wondering if she wanted the story on tape because she was planning to kill him after he had finished telling it.
“Bill Thorne was the cruelest man I ever knew,” he began, his voice trembling. “He tormented your mother, Amanda. You knew that. Nothing she did was good enough for him. He took his anger out on her. He beat her. He didn’t hurt you, though, did he, Amanda?”
“No,” she whispered, trembling too. “He never hit me. But I knew. I saw. I hated him for it. I wanted someone to stop him, but no one ever did . . . because he was a cop. You saw what he did to her—the black eyes, the bruises. You saw. The other cops saw. They all looked the other way. I could never understand that,” she said. “The others, maybe . . . but you. She loved you. How could you have let that go on?”
“Your mother didn’t want—”
“Don’t. Don’t even pay lip service to that excuse. That she didn’t want the embarrassment, that she didn’t want to make trouble. She was a battered woman.”
He looked away, ashamed.
“Because he was a cop,” she said. “You let it all come to what happened that night because you couldn’t rat out a rotten son of a bitch like Bill Thorne.”
Wyatt didn’t answer. There was no answer.
“On the night in question . . .” she said.
“I got a call from her that something was wrong. She was hysterical. Bill had come home unexpectedly. He’d been drinking. Bill would do that—drink on the job. He had no regard for any rules but his own. He—” He broke off and started again, the emotions of that night coming back. “He raped her. He beat her.
“Evelyn had had enough,” he said, staring down at the desktop, tears falling faster. “She got hold of a gun, and she shot Bill twice in the chest. Then she called me.
“I couldn’t let her be punished for what Bill had done to her. I couldn’t trust that the courts would take her side. What if it came out she and I had been seeing each other? A prosecutor would have seen it as motive. She might have gone to prison.”
“And so you found Weagle—”
“He was there. In the neighborhood. He was on the street as I went to your house. I didn’t know what he might have seen or heard.”
Wyatt put his head in his hands and began to sob. “I got him to come into the house. And I shot him . . . with Bill’s thirty-eight. Oh, Jesus . . . Then Mike came . . . and I was there with the body. I panicked. . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Kovac said, pushing the office door open. He stared at Wyatt, who was crying and choking and did not look up. “You shot Mike Fallon.”
LISKA STOOD FROZEN. A thousand things went through her mind in a heartbeat. To rush him, to scream, to throw something, to try to take cover. Thank God she had called the boys earlier and told them she loved them.
“Put the gun down, Rubel,” she said in a tone that was remarkably, ridiculously conversational.
“You bitch.”
He wore the mirrored shades. She couldn’t see his eyes. Not good.
“You’re smart to give it up here,” Liska said. “No one will hurt you. You’re with family.”
“It was none of your fucking business.”
“You killed a man,” she said. “That’s all my business.”
Behind him, Liska could see Barr
y Castleton moving in slowly, his eyes huge, gun in hand.
“Put the gun down,” she said. “You won’t leave this building, Derek.”
“What do I care?” he said. “I knew that when I came in. I’m a dead man walking. I’ve got nothing to lose. Better to die now, fast. And what a bonus—I get to take you with me, bitch.”
“YOU PUT MIKE Fallon in that chair,” Kovac said, coming into the room. “All these years you let everyone think you were the big hero. You put him in that fucking chair.”
Wyatt cried harder, blubbering through his hands. “I didn’t mean to! I panicked. When I realized . . . I did what I could to keep him alive. Thinking all the while that my career was over, that he would tell. But still I kept him alive—”
“And became a hero because of it.”
“What could I do? I tried to make it up to him.”
“Yeah, I’m sure having a big-screen TV made all the difference,” Kovac said. “Did he know it was you that shot him?”
“He claimed he never remembered all of it. And yet . . . there were times . . . comments he made . . . I thought maybe . . .”
“And no one ever checked the ballistics beyond seeing all the slugs were thirty-eights,” Kovac said. “’Cause you were all cops except the dead mutt with the record. And besides, you had a witness—Evelyn. Or were there two?” he asked, looking to Savard.
Savard never took her eyes off Wyatt. “I was told to stay in my room, to say I hadn’t seen anything. I did that because of Mother, because she would have taken the blame.”
“Jesus.” Kovac took a breath, feeling sick.
“Mike was the hero,” Wyatt insisted. “Mike was the hero.”
“Mike is dead. Gaines killed him. Because of you. And he killed Andy,” Kovac said. “You knew Andy was asking about that night. He came to you. Then he turns up dead. You had to know—”
“No! I thought he killed himself!” Wyatt insisted. “Really—”
“You could have stopped it all,” Savard said, tears running down her face. “I could have stopped it. Andy had come to me too. After he found Mother. I should have stopped it then. I’m a cop.
