Playing Dead

by Allison Brennan

  Tom’s eyes were dry, but his throat constricted as the brutal slaying of his wife hit him. She didn’t deserve this, didn’t deserve to die an adulteress.

  Tom didn’t touch anything. The man’s face was turned away from the door. Barely breathing, Tom walked around the bed to look at his face. Pent-up rage ate at his gut. He would have yelled at Lydia had she been alive. He’d been prepared to confront her and her lover. Throw her out of the house. Now? Guilt and anger battled with a surreal sense that this could not be happening.

  Tom stared at the dead man, one eye full of blood from the bullet behind it. But Tom recognized him—a man he’d never met personally but had seen in action in the courtroom. A prosecutor, Chase Taverton.

  He turned to leave, to call in the murder, to give himself five minutes of fresh air before he told Claire her mother was dead.

  Then he saw it. His personal firearm, a Smith & Wesson .357. On the nightstand, not in the drawer. He always stored it in the nightstand on his side of the bed.

  It was on top of the nightstand, on Lydia’s side of the bed.

  His gun.

  His wife.

  Her lover.

  This wasn’t right. His gun was in the wrong place. Had someone used his gun to kill them? His feet were like lead as he stared, trying to make sense of what had happened in his bedroom.

  He heard the front door slam. “Daddy?”

  Claire.

  He couldn’t let her see her mother like this.

  He quickly left the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind him. “Claire, don’t—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We need to leave.” Get her out of the house, protect the crime scene. Protect Claire.

  “Is Mom gone? What happened? What—” Tom’s little girl stared at the gun in his hand.

  Fear crossed her young, pretty face. Was she afraid of him? No, not his Claire Beth. He’d walked into a nightmare.

  “Claire, I came home and found her. She’s dead, honey.”

  “Dead? Who? What happened?” She said the words, but confused and scared, hadn’t comprehended what he meant.

  His own gun had killed his wife. The shock hit him and he realized he was in serious trouble. He didn’t want Claire to know but the truth was certain to come out.

  “Claire Beth, we have to leave now. Your mother—God, I wish I didn’t have to tell you like this—she’s dead, honey. Someone killed her and Taverton. They’re both dead.”

  Claire shook her head, her eyes wild, her jaw clenched in denial. “No. No! I don’t believe you!”

  Tom hadn’t been holding her tightly enough and she broke free, stumbled around him, bumped against the wall, ran to the end of the hall.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. A neighbor must have heard the shots and called the police. How long ago?

  Tom followed his daughter, reached for her as she flung open his bedroom door. She stared.

  “Claire—”

  She screamed.

  Tom grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to him. “We have to leave.”

  “Daddy—what happened? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Tears streamed down Claire’s cheeks. There was doubt in her blue eyes. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe her own father.

  “I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  “But—” She looked at the gun in his hand, her entire body trembling.

  “I didn’t kill your mother.”

  The sirens were closer. On their street. “We have to talk to the police. Tell them everything. The truth.”

  Claire’s bottom lip quivered. She pushed away from him and ran from the house. Through the open front door Tom saw two patrol cars pull up. One cop—a rookie named Adam Parks—jumped out and ran to Claire, pulling her to safety behind the car, peppering the distraught girl with questions.

  Tom holstered his service weapon and stepped from the house, hands in front of him, palms up. He was in uniform of course. He was on duty. Parks looked at him quizzically. “O’Brien?”

  “This is my house,” Tom said. “There’re two dead bodies in the bedroom. I didn’t touch anything.” Not that it would matter, Tom thought. It was his house, his gun, his wife in bed with another man.

  He knew what the crime scene looked like. He knew what these cops would think as soon as they saw the naked bodies.

  Worse, he knew what Claire thought. How could he convince her he’d never hurt her mother?

  Parks and another cop—Reynolds—went in and searched the house, came out, and said, “Detectives are on their way, and the chief of police.”

  Tom nodded.

  “What happened?” Reynolds asked quietly. “You came home for lunch and found your wife in bed with another man? Just lost it?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “It’s just you and me, Tom.”

  Tom turned. He wasn’t going to answer any questions. He knew better than to talk without an attorney.

  Seventy-two hours later he was arrested on two counts of murder.

  THREE

  When Mitch Bianchi trained in underwater forensics, he thought he’d find something he was not only good at, but enjoyed.

  He was very wrong, at least on the latter point. He was good at it—combining his love and skill of diving with his innate law enforcement savvy. But recovering floaters was the worst job in the Bureau, even worse than his work identifying remains in the mass graves in Kosovo early in his FBI career.

  But skill trumped desire every time in the Bureau, and this time Mitch had a stake in the investigation. If Oliver Maddox was dead, it gave Mitch one more direction to turn in his private investigation into the murders of Lydia O’Brien and Chase Taverton.

  “You’re quiet this morning,” Steve Donovan said as he turned onto River Road heading toward Isleton, where Maddox’s white Explorer had been found in the river. According to the sheriff’s diver, the victim in the driver’s seat had been there for a while. Four months? Possible. And it would confirm Mitch’s suspicion that Oliver Maddox had found out something that made someone nervous enough to kill. Again.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Funny how you never mentioned you were house-sitting for Nolan while he’s at Quantico.”

  Mitch didn’t show a physical reaction. “How’d you hear?”

  “Nolan called in last week for some of his files and mentioned it in passing. I remembered he lives only two blocks from Claire O’Brien. So I drove by a couple times, just to check it out, and surprise, I saw you sitting and talking with her at Starbucks Sunday morning. I didn’t have a chance to call you on it in private until now.”

  Trying to come up with a lame excuse or lie would only damage Mitch’s friendship with Steve. “You knew I was looking into O’Brien’s case.”

  “I didn’t think you were playing with O’Brien’s daughter.”

  “It’s not like that, Donovan.”

  “Don’t jerk me around, Bianchi. You’re playing a dangerous game here. Meg will draw and quarter you if she finds out you’re working the O’Brien case after you were removed. The only reason you’re on this assignment is because you’re the only diver we have in-house.”

  “It’s complicated.” Mitch had to tell Steve the truth. In some ways, he was grateful that Steve had confronted him. Mitch could use a fresh mind to go over the details.

  “We have a twenty-minute drive,” said Steve.

  “We’ll talk later. I need to lay it out for you. I still don’t know enough to draw any solid conclusions.”

  Steve’s mouth tightened. “Don’t screw with me anymore.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Seven o’clock, tonight, Fox & Goose, and you’re paying.”

  “Fair enough.” Mitch didn’t want to meet at the Fox & Goose—he and Claire were supposed to go there tonight to listen to friends of hers who had a band—but Mitch wasn’t picking Claire up until eight. An hour with Steve, then
he could drive the five minutes to Claire’s place. Steve would be long gone.

  He planned to tell Steve all about his deception. Everything from his research into the O’Brien-Taverton murders to O’Brien saving Mitch’s life to Mitch befriending Claire under false pretenses. The truth about everything, except for how close he and Claire had become over the last couple months. Mitch couldn’t acknowledge to Steve—to anyone—that his feelings for Claire had moved far beyond professional interest.

  They drove in awkward silence. Mitch looked through his notes on Oliver Maddox. He first learned of O’Brien’s connection with the law student through the prison visitor logs. Mitch had looked for Maddox after the prison break, ostensibly because O’Brien might have tried to contact him. But he’d been pulled from the O’Brien case almost immediately. Politics or jurisdictional grandstanding, he didn’t know which. He should have stopped then, but when Mitch found out that Maddox had been missing since a week before the earthquake, his instincts told him something was rotten. He put a BOLO on Maddox with his license plate and description.

  Now they had Oliver Maddox’s car and a grossly decayed body at the wheel. After four months the victim would be impossible to positively identify at first glance. Hell, a floater after twenty-four hours was green and sloshy and hard to ID.

  Mitch’s instincts told him it was Maddox. Disappeared without a trace, and now his car was found underwater.

  Accident? Or murder?

  The narrow, two-lane road to Isleton that followed the meandering Sacramento River was one of the most dangerous in the county. Accidents were common, especially during rain or the deadly fog that often descended upon the San Joaquin Valley. There was no guardrail to protect a motorist from going into the river. Once in the water, most accident victims didn’t survive.

  The California Delta covered over 738,000 acres. Hundreds of miles of waterways cut through the Delta, the water coming from the Sierra Nevadas through not only the Sacramento River, but numerous smaller rivers and creeks. They all eventually converged before merging with the San Francisco Bay. Isleton was a small river town of fewer than a thousand residents in the southwest corner of Sacramento County. It was known for its annual summer Crawdad Festival and not much else. Mitch didn’t want to think about what those crawdads had done to the body in the Explorer.

  Maddox’s vehicle had been found in the river two miles north of the city limits. The Sacramento River flowed steadily, but today’s current didn’t look too bad.

  A crowd had gathered alongside the river: local cops and their FBI team. Steve pulled up next to the emergency vehicles and said, “Ready?”

  “Always,” Mitch replied.

  They got out and a deputy sheriff—Clarkston on the badge—approached with the sheriff’s diver. The local diver was older than Mitch and a foot shorter, graying, with a craggy face and unusually large hands. “Harry Young. Thanks for coming out.”

  They shook hands, exchanged credentials, and Young said, “I didn’t disturb the car. It’s a white 1998 Ford Explorer, registered to Oliver Maddox. A missing person report was filed by Tammy Amunson on January 23 of this year. One victim in the driver’s seat, been under for a time—eyes gone, fingers missing. A lot of critter damage, but the trunk and limbs are intact. No visible wounds, seat belt intact and engaged, windows down or broken on impact.”

  “Was there any evidence along the riverbank of a car going into the water?”

  “If there was, it’s long gone. Four months, rain, weather, growth.”

  “Who found it?”

  “Fisherman. Early this morning, at dawn. His line got caught and when he freed it, he got a chunk of clothing with it.”

  “Where’s the evidence now?”

  “Bagged,” the deputy said. “It’ll go to our lab.”

  The deputy was more antagonistic than the older, easygoing diver. Mitch smiled at him. Play nice with the locals, he could hear Meg’s stern lecture. The FBI had better relations with local law enforcement in recent years, but some cops were old school.

  “How deep?” he asked.

  The diver responded. “Thirty feet. We got someone from the EPA on the way since this is an environmentally protected area.”

  “It’s now a crime scene.”

  Young grinned, patted Mitch on the back. “I’m gonna like you. I got the crew waiting to haul the car up, but your office said don’t touch the vehicle. Don’t much see what you can do down there.”

  “We want as much evidence as possible intact before we haul up the vehicle. We may bag the body underwater and bring it up separately to minimize damage.” But if it was too difficult to remove the body from the vehicle, they’d bag what they could and haul up the body with the SUV. “What kind of fish activity do we have here?”

  “Sturgeon, stripers, crawfish. Hell, this is a terrific fishing spot.”

  “It was an accident,” the deputy interrupted.

  Mitch raised his eyebrows. “You have a witness who saw it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Don’t assume anything.”

  The deputy bristled at Mitch’s tone. Mitch kept his expression calm: Diplomacy wasn’t his strength. Action was.

  Steve smoothed the tension, saying to Young, “Why don’t you dive with us? You can see what we do, maybe it’ll help in future investigations.”

  “Doesn’t look like you need us,” Clarkston said.

  Young interjected, “I’d like to go back under. Good practice.”

  Mitch took Steve’s lead. “Great. I need an experienced partner.”

  Steve pulled Young and Clarkston away from Mitch and showed them the sophisticated underwater camera the ERT unit had purchased last year with their limited discretionary budget.

  Mitch walked over to Special Agents Duncan and Morales. Though both were young—about thirty, coming into the Bureau under the age of twenty-five, a rarity these days—he didn’t have to tell them what to look for.

  “Split up and take a Sheriff’s deputy with you.” He pointed north and south of their location. “We’re looking for where the Explorer went in, but based on the remains it was months ago. Anything you find, mark it and inform Donovan. I’ll be underwater.”

  When Mitch first joined the FBI more than a decade ago, the Violent Crimes Squad had been one of the best-staffed and funded units in the Bureau. They’d have had a full squad of eight out here to recover the body and evidence. After 9/11, resources for their unit were minimal and staffing was barely twenty percent of what it had been. Priorities had shifted to counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Mitch had mixed feelings about the changes, but he’d adjusted accordingly. They all had.

  Mitch finished putting on his diving gear. Even though he was about to enter murky river water and face a dead man, a rush overcame him.

  He met up with Young and they checked and double-checked the equipment, then went out on the boat over the spot where the Explorer rested beneath the surface. Steve and a deputy manned the boat while Young and Mitch fell back into the cold water.

  Maddox had been missing since the end of January. Chances were he’d been in the river the entire time. But proving it was homicide instead of an accident would be difficult at best, unless they were lucky enough to find a bullet entry wound or obvious stab marks. The fish and crustaceans would feed on any exposed areas first, which often made it more difficult to determine how a body had been assaulted. But a gaping wound no matter how gnawed by river life would point toward foul play.

  The water was icy, having traveled from the Sierra Nevadas where the snow had been melting all spring, filling the creeks and tributaries, merging to make this river. The ninety-degree weather did little to warm the thirty-foot depths where the Explorer rested, its wheels buried deep in the sediment. The wet suit protected Mitch from the worst of the cold, and he took a moment to acclimate himself to the water pressure, diminished light, and temperature.

  He approached cautiously, taking the time to inspect and photograph the
front of the vehicle—there were no obvious collision marks. They’d need a more detailed inspection, but it appeared that nothing had hit this SUV, front or back. There was some minimal damage on the passenger side, but nothing to indicate a collision so violent it could push a car into the river. One problem with water was that it carried evidence away from the scene. If there had been branches or leaves embedded in the undercarriage of the car, suggesting perhaps where the vic went in, the evidence could easily have been washed away under the constant pressure of the flowing river.

  The Explorer was fully submerged and held fast, the front end sinking deeper into the muck because of the weight of the engine. The water wasn’t too murky at first, the sun above cutting through, though as they walked along the bottom of the river and disturbed the sludge, their field of vision deteriorated. The underwater lights he and Young used cast an odd illumination around them, making the shadows darker.

  Only the windshield was intact, which suggested the driver hadn’t hit the water with any great speed. Mitch ran his finger along the window edge, felt the top of the retracted driver’s-side window. The smooth edge told him that it had been down when the vehicle went in. Mitch inspected the other windows. They’d all been down on impact; none had broken under the pressure. Who drove with all their windows down in the frigid cold of a Sacramento January? He indicated the evidence to Young, who did his own inspection and nodded.

  The victim was strapped into the driver’s seat. Most victims would unbuckle themselves and attempt to escape, unless the accident rendered them unconscious.

  It was virtually impossible to tell anything about the victim, though with the constant movement of the fresh, cold mountain water through the car, decomposition wasn’t as advanced as Mitch would have guessed. A recent body would have been dark green, but this body was extremely pale, almost translucent, as the gases in the body had leached out over time. The body was intact for the most part, though Mitch knew if they tried to move it, skin, hair, and potential evidence would be lost. The vic’s eyes were gone, as well as his ears, nose, lips, and a good chunk of his face. The vic’s fingers were also missing. The body could have fed the fish for some time. Clothing offered some protection because it could take years to disintegrate.