Eyes of Justice

by Lis Wiehl

  “Young and Halvorsen,” Ophelia said. “I’ll check them out.” But two minutes later she had learned that neither of them had been released and nothing had recently changed about their status.

  The day dragged itself forward as they waited for further word from Nicole. Ophelia made a print-out of the remaining 33 names and then ran them past Allison.

  “Jayson Forrester.”

  Allison looked up, remembering. “Worker safety issues. His company was going down the tubes, so he started cutting corners—and as a result two people were injured and one was killed. But he was over sixty and frail when he was sentenced five years ago—he’s certainly not the guy who shot Lindsay.”

  Ophelia ran a line through Forrester’s name. “How about Freddie Riding?”

  “Freddie Riding. Freddie Riding,” Allison repeated. “Oh yeah, mail fraud. He cried when he was found guilty. Sobbed, actually. Prison might have toughened him up, but not to the point where he became a stone-cold killer.”

  Ophelia crossed his name off. And so it went.

  Jed Bitton.

  A definite no.

  Noe Crossley.

  So scared he had begged the judge at his sentencing.

  Two or three times Ophelia mentioned a name Allison thought was slightly more likely to have turned killer than others, but none of them made her straighten up and say, “That’s him!”

  Ophelia was starting to think they had come to a dead end. Where had she gone wrong?

  “Who’s next?” Allison asked, drumming her fingers on the arm of the couch.

  “That’s it. There aren’t any more.”

  “Then what are we going to do? We have to find that guy before he kills Nicole. We have to.”

  It was worse than that, Ophelia thought. If she failed, not only would Nicole die, but it seemed likely that Allison would too.

  CHAPTER 33

  Dressed as a housekeeper, Nic stood in front of Room 16 at the Castaways Motel. From behind the door came muffled conversation and the low thump of music. A woman laughed. One of the men’s voices, Nic realized, must belong to the guy who had killed Cassidy and Lindsay.

  He was partying with his buddies and whoever else they had picked up along the way. Celebrating the taking of $8,720 and a woman’s life.

  The hair rose on the back of her neck.

  After leaving Ophelia’s the night before, Nic and Leif had gone back to the field office to track down the lead about the finger. The best photos of the two masked men captured from the surveillance video had been sent to law enforcement agencies across the country, along with information about the crime, the probability that the shorter suspect had a damaged or missing index finger, and a request for ID.

  Late this afternoon their efforts had paid off. The FBI had gotten a call from a corrections officer at Lompoc. He thought the short plump bank robber was quite possibly Denny Elliot, a con originally from the Portland area who had been released from federal prison a month ago. While Elliot was in Lompoc, another inmate had bit off the top third of his index finger in the exercise yard. The gloves he had worn at the bank had helped camouflage the missing finger.

  Had Elliot taken part in Cassidy’s killing? But Nicole hadn’t investigated his crimes, and when she asked Ophelia to check the database, it showed that Allison hadn’t ever prosecuted him. It seemed likely that the killer was acting on his own, and had enlisted Elliot to help him cover his tracks as he picked off the three women one by one.

  Elliot’s parole officer said he was staying with his sister. The sister said she hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, but she did have his cell phone number. An hour ago the cell phone had been tracked to this motel. The GPS records showed that it had been in the same location since midnight. A plan was quickly pulled together.

  Now Nic rapped again on the peeling white paint of the door, hard enough that her knuckles stung. The sun pressed between her shoulder blades like a brand. Even though it was nearly six o’clock, the heat showed no signs of abating. The air felt thick, and dark clouds were massing on the horizon. A storm was coming. It couldn’t come fast enough for Nic.

  “Housekeeping!” she repeated. Loud enough that they should be able to hear her. But the noise didn’t falter. They must be too drunk or too high to care.

  When someone finally did look out the peephole, all they would see was a housekeeper standing in front of a laundry cart. Nic looked the part, what with her dark skin and her borrowed uniform of a pink short-sleeved polyester shirt and maroon elastic-waist pants. What wouldn’t be seen through the peephole was the Kevlar vest she wore underneath the shirt, or the Glock tucked in the back of the waistband of her pants. The person on the other side of the door also wouldn’t see Leif pressed against the wall on one side of Nic and Karl Zehner on the other. Or the dozen other agents scattered throughout the complex, all ready to rush in.

  In private Leif had argued with the plan. “You should not be the one going to the door,” he had told her after pulling her into the copy room. “What if he makes you? You might as well be wearing a sign around your neck that says ‘I’m Nicole Hedges, go ahead and shoot me.’ ”

  “Who else are we going to send to get these guys to open the door, Leif? It’s going to be hard enough not to spook them, having someone show up at this hour. A housekeeper is the best option we have.”

  “We can get Manny to put on a uniform shirt and pose as a maintenance worker.”

  “Yeah, and how many times do you think a maintenance guy knocks on the door at that place? No one has done any maintenance there since the 1950s. Let’s face it, I’m the only female agent of color we have right now in the field office, and a dark-skinned housekeeper is going to be the only person they might open the door to at six p.m. And don’t worry, I won’t look anything like Nicole Hedges.”

  Nic had watched the film of Lindsay being shot over and over. She knew the killer wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her—if he recognized her. Which was why she was wearing a bandana over her hair and clear glasses over her eyes. To disguise the shape of her face, she had stuffed a wad of cotton in each cheek. With makeup she had added shadows under her eyes and hollowed out her face. Now she looked two decades older, a woman who had a close relationship with hard work and hard times.

  And hard times were what the motels along this stretch of North Interstate Avenue were all about. They catered to people who weren’t too choosy—hookers, parolees, people one step up from homeless. The Castaways was a perfect place for three bank robbers to go to ground, count their money, and maybe invite a girl or two over to celebrate with them.

  The manager had sketched the layout of the room for them. Once Nic was inside, she would find an open alcove with a sink to her immediate right. Past that lay a small bathroom with another sink, a toilet, and a shower. Straight back from the door and again to the right, half hidden by the wall behind the alcove and the bathroom, she would see two beds.

  The room on one side hadn’t been rented. The room on the other was occupied by a couple, but the manager had called them three times and gotten no answer. If they came back while the arrests were still going down, the perimeter team would snag them before they could get too close. The remaining guests—there weren’t many—had been contacted by phone and warned to stay in their rooms.

  “Housekeeping!” Nic called again. She rapped so hard her knuckles felt bruised. The conversation didn’t pause. The music kept thumping. The woman laughed again, setting Nic’s teeth on edge. At least they were probably too wasted to pose a threat.

  At a nod from Leif, Nic slipped the card key in the slot, her sweaty fingers sliding on the plastic. The light under the handle turned green, followed by a faint beep. She threw the door open at the same time as she grabbed her gun and entered the darkened room. Immediately, she stepped to the side so she wasn’t silhouetted against the bright light of the day. The FBI had a name for entryways—vertical coffins.

  “FBI—freeze!” Gun in hand, Nic blinked in the
sudden darkness. Leif and Karl darted in behind her, their guns also at the ready. Nic narrowed her eyes to slits, trying to force them to adjust to the dimness. She saw no one, just the bottom halves of the two unmade beds and a dozen empty beer bottles scattered across the threadbare carpet.

  But she could still hear music, still hear people talking in voices too quiet to understand. The woman laughed again. Some part of Nic had already known the woman was going to laugh.

  Her eyes found the source of the party sounds. She could just see the corner of an open laptop sitting on the cheap dresser between the two beds. The computer was broadcasting in an endless loop. The party sounds weren’t real at all.

  Nic still saw no one.

  But the air was heavy and hot with the scent of blood.

  All this took only a second or two to process. More agents were crowding in. Leif kicked open the bathroom door. Karl crouched low and then burst around the corner and into the main section of the room.

  And a second later they all knew where the stink of carnage was coming from.

  The plump man Nic recognized from his mug shots as Denny Elliot lay sprawled in the bathtub with a slug in his heart. In the sleeping area, between one of the beds and a wall, lay a redheaded man she didn’t recognize.

  The reason Nic didn’t recognize him might have had something to do with the fact that he had been shot in the face. Still, even if he had been bald, he was too heavily muscled to be the man who had killed Lindsay.

  The room was no longer a criminals’ hideout. It was a crime scene. As the team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team, Leif arranged for two agents to guard the room and dismissed everyone else who wasn’t part of the team. Then Leif, Nic, and the other ERT members went back to their cars in the parking lot to put on shoe coverings, hairnets, and white Tyvek suits. The lookie-loos were already gathering at the yellow perimeter tape—informally known as flypaper for its ability to snag gawkers. Nic paid them no mind as she pulled the wads of cotton from her mouth, then covered her hair and pulled on rubber gloves. She tried not to think about how hot it was.

  Or the fact that their one lead was dead.

  Within the ERT Leif had a dual role: team leader and photographer. He put Nic in charge of the photo log, and together they went back in alone to document the scene before the others processed it.

  “How long do you think they’ve been dead?” Leif asked as he snapped a photo of Denny Elliot. Elliot’s eyes were wide and surprised, a neat hole in his chest.

  She leaned closer, trying not to be grossed out by the silverfish skittering on the bottom of the tub in a vain effort to hide from the light. “Judging by the color of the blood and how tacky it looks, I’d say several hours. Maybe even longer.”

  Nic imagined the bald man standing a few steps from the door and shooting Elliot as he opened the door to the john, then pivoting and shooting the man next to the bed. While it was possible he had relied on the street noise outside to cover the crack of the shots, she thought it likely that he had used a silencer.

  They moved into the main room where Leif began taking photos that showed the two beds and the redheaded man. Someone had turned down the sound on the computer. Soon it would be wrapped in a pink antistatic bag and delivered to the FBI’s computer forensics lab.

  Nic realized that something else was missing. The pillowcase with the cash was nowhere in evidence. She pointed it out to Leif. “Do you think he killed them because he didn’t want to split the money?”

  “I think first he hired them. And then he fired them,” Leif said, keeping his voice low because the other ERT agents were waiting just on the other side of the door. “With a gun. He wanted everyone to think it was a bank robbery, just like he wanted everyone to think that Cassidy died at Rick’s hands.”

  “And now we’re back at square one,” Nic said. “Because I doubt very much that he left any fingerprints behind. This whole scene didn’t bother him one whit. He kills these two guys and then he has the presence of mind to download a loop of party sounds.”

  “It feels like he’s methodically ticking things off a list,” Leif said. “And since I think you’re one of them, you’re staying at my place again tonight.”

  Nic tilted her head. “You say that like I don’t have a choice.”

  “You don’t, Nic. Not when this guy is still out there, and he’s looking for you. I don’t want to give him an opening.” Leif snapped a photo of the laptop and the beer bottles on the dresser.

  “Wait.” Nic pointed. “What’s that? It looks like a cell phone.”

  He leaned closer to get a picture. Then they both blinked in surprise. For a second, the cell phone had flickered to life and then gone dark.

  Leif’s eyes narrowed and then he cursed under his breath.

  A light went on for Nic. “He’s been listening to us this whole time, right?”

  Leif looked disgusted. “Who needs to go to Radio Shack to get a bug? All he needed were two phones. Before he left here, he called one with the other, answered, and then put this one down where he could hear what went on in this room.”

  Nic tried to think how they could use his trick to their own advantage. “We can get the number that called this phone and trace it.”

  “It won’t matter. He’ll already have dumped the other one. I’m betting both of them originally belonged to our two dead guys.”

  “But, Leif—” Nic cut to the heart of the matter. “What exactly did we say? How much do you think he overheard?”

  In the motel’s parking lot, a bald man wearing a baseball cap slipped the battery from the phone he had been using to eavesdrop on Nicole Hedges and Leif Larsen. So she was staying with Larsen? He would have to figure out how to separate them. And when he did, Nicole Hedges was a dead woman.

  Before he left, the bald man dropped to one knee beside Nicole’s Crown Victoria as if he were tying his shoelace. Instead he stuck a black GPS tracker the size of a domino to the underside of the bumper.

  CHAPTER 34

  Nicole had called to say that the FBI had found Denny Elliot at a cheap motel in North Portland. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that they hadn’t been able to talk to Elliot because he was dead. Shot in the heart.

  But as far as Ophelia was concerned, there was more good news that helped ameliorate the bad. Because a second man had been found dead along with Elliot. He had been identified by his fingerprints as Reggie Bates, another ex-con. Nicole and Leif thought it likely that he had been the getaway driver at Oregon Federal.

  With both of the other participants dead, it seemed clear that whoever had masterminded the bank robbery had decided to get rid of any loose ends. It fit their theory that the robbery was merely a cover designed to disguise the fact that someone was going after Cassidy, Allison, and Nicole. Elliot and Bates had played their parts and were no longer needed.

  For dinner, Ophelia heated up two Healthy Choice frozen meals and opened a bagged salad. Because Allison was there, she got out her place mats, but she ended up eating in her office. Now that she had a second name, she sliced and diced the data again, seeing if any of the thirty-three people they had identified earlier had been incarcerated with both Denny Elliot and Reggie Bates.

  She cut the list down to eleven names. Eleven. They were so close now. She knew it.

  She walked back into the dining room with the list she had printed out. Allison was pushing the contents of her frozen dinner back and forth in its box. It looked like she hadn’t eaten any of it. Wasn’t she supposed to be eating for two?

  Ophelia read the list of names out a second time, pausing after each one. It should be easier to pick the real culprit now that it was shorter. And Allison had had a bit of time to think more about the possibilities.

  As she went down the list, Ophelia was undaunted by Allison’s flat reaction to each name. She was probably still recovering from the brutal murder of her sister.

  Undaunted, that is, until Allison had rejected all elev
en names.

  “None of them?” Ophelia asked. “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t see any of them doing it. They’re all too old, too weak, or too stupid.”

  “But it has to be someone on the list,” Ophelia insisted. “If you had to pick one of them, who would it be?”

  “I told you.” Allison set her jaw. “None.”

  But that wasn’t possible, was it? Ophelia went back to her office and started again from the beginning. She checked her logic, examined her computer code, and occasionally came out to question Allison again. Had she gone wrong in one of her assumptions? Or was Allison displaying a lack of imagination, unable to recognize who was capable of exacting such terrible revenge?

  And suddenly it came to Ophelia, the realization so abrupt she almost felt like she was falling. There was one parameter she hadn’t even thought to check. How could she have been so stupid?

  It was true that a prisoner who was released would be free to hunt Allison down.

  But so would a prisoner who had escaped. Ophelia’s fingers flew over her computer keyboard.

  A few minutes later she was staring at the answer.

  Lucas Maul. A convicted bank robber. And until twelve days ago, an inmate of United States Penitentiary Lee in Pennington Gap, Virginia. Then he had been transported to the hospital for some sort of medical problem, where he had escaped. Authorities in Virginia were still hunting him.

  But he wasn’t in Virginia, Ophelia realized. He was in Portland.

  Getting his revenge.

  CHAPTER 35

  Eli Winkler, the Phoenix patrolman who had responded to Gina Hodson’s call, put on gloves of his own and then tested one of the gloves from the messenger bag. He used a plastic wand that looked like a pregnancy test. In less than three minutes, Eli was looking at two blue lines that meant the dark red sticky substance was not just blood, but human blood.