“I’ll make a call to the highway patrol. They run security at the capitol. I’ll meet you there. We can get set up in their offices and watch the surveillance feeds of the place,” John said before he hung up.
Lieutenant Barnes approached Paula’s desk. His expression was tight, his emotions buried deep.
“You need to find someplace to be,” Barnes said. “Don’t tell me where. The DA and her investigators are on the way over here to see the chief. Clarke is pissed off that we hid the fact you were alive and let her run with her television interview, and she wants to nail down this case. If I don’t know where you’re off to, I can’t tell them where to find you. Get it?”
“They don’t have anything. It’s all circumstantial.”
“They pulled hair and fiber from the bodies and DNA off the hammer used on Wing and the knife from the Ronland stabbing.”
“I know. They should have my DNA on them. They’re mine. Someone—Sherman—took them from my place. My DNA is on the murder victims.”
“This was the bombshell you warned me that Karen had? Never mind. Not now. It doesn’t look good, Paula. Find someplace to be and we can work out your surrender.”
“Or, we could nail the killer,” she said.
“Time’s run out.”
“So I have one shot to make sure it isn’t me.”
FIFTY-NINE
Sherman glanced at the dash-mounted clock. He was going to miss his flight if he dicked around with Simmons. But he needed the money to start his new life near the equator. He checked for a text message confirming an electronic deposit from Simmons—no unread messages.
Simmons’s number was in the recent calls list, and he tapped the name harder than he needed to connect the phone call.
“That you, little pig?” Simmons asked.
“I think we may have had a miscommunication. You were supposed to have sent me the agreed upon amount.”
“You won’t have any need for the money when they send you back to prison.”
“Who said anything about going back to prison?”
“You did a stupid thing, setting up Stubbs like that. I’m not gonna risk you setting me up by taking my money and running.”
“Like I said, Stubbs isn’t my problem,” Sherman said.
“It’s your problem if you want to see another dime of my money. I want a face-to-face meeting. You get what you want when I get what I want. Simple as that.”
Sherman had set up the electronic transfer to avoid an ambush by Simmons and his knuckle draggers. This wasn’t how he wanted it to go at all.
“You hear me, little pig?”
“Once that deposit is made, I will meet you.”
“I wanna meet first.”
“When I get the message that the money has hit my account, I will text you a partial address of the house. I’ll meet you in the capitol rotunda and hand you the keys.”
“The ro-what?” Simmons said.
“The dome? Under the dome. That’s the big round part on top,” Sherman said.
“Don’t push me. You screw me on this, and I swear you won’t walk out of there alive.”
“You have twenty minutes to get that money in my account.” Sherman ended the call.
Sherman pocketed his phone and got out of the car. He darted across three lanes of midday traffic, and a taxi had to slam on the brakes. When he got to the sidewalk surrounding the park, Sherman confirmed that no one had followed him across the busy street.
He pulled the collar of his jacket up. It was far too hot, but with his head down, he didn’t stand out among the state workers out for a stroll around the park. Halfway through his first circle, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He continued walking and looked at the phone. Simmons made the deposit.
Sherman tapped out a response on the keypad and sent off a text to Simmons. It read: 4587.
He pocketed the phone again and tossed a rolled-up paper bag, another fast-food container, in the bushes at the base of the south steps of the capitol. He took the stairs at a casual pace. The eyes of the security team at the metal detector were already assessing him. He didn’t look bad for a few days out of the prison psych ward, but he didn’t fit the bill as a corporate lobbyist either.
Sherman dumped his pockets into a plastic container, including his cell phone, which buzzed when he placed it into the bucket.
One of the security officers asked him if he needed to get the call, and he said he’d wait. A few steps through the metal detector and he was passed through after a pat down. One of the security screeners shrugged at his partner like he had expected to hear the metal detector hit on the scruffy-looking visitor.
Sherman peered out the south windows and caught a glimpse of Junior, Wallace, and two other thugs. They’d arrived together, and it looked like they had come to a temporary truce so they could hunt Sherman down. They split up in pairs, with Junior and Wallace heading toward the same entrance he’d used.
Junior and Wallace working together. How long had they been planning this out behind his back?
SIXTY
A five-minute drive from the police headquarters put John on Fifteenth Street at Capitol Park. He nosed the Crown Vic into an open space near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Paula met him on the curb while he tossed an Official Police Business placard on the dash to ward off the parking enforcement officers who saturated the downtown corridor.
The east steps of the capitol loomed beyond the bronze-and-granite memorial to the Vietnam Veterans, and every time John walked through the walls listing the 5,657 names of the Californians who died in the conflict, a strange sense of loss came over him. He recognized only one name on the memorial, a distant family friend he’d never met, yet his sacrifice along with the others felt deeply personal.
“Sherman tell you where the meet was supposed to go down?”
Paula scanned the rose garden and surrounding treelined paths for any sign of Sherman or that they had been baited into an ambush. “No. He wasn’t specific. God, there must be a hundred places someone could hide out here.”
They walked in the direction of the east steps, and John called the highway patrol security offices. While he was on the phone, he pointed up a light pole to a black camera dome, one of several he could make out, arranged throughout the park.
John finished and pocketed his cell.
“They agreed to let us set up in the security offices. We can monitor these cameras from there and pinpoint Sherman and whoever he’s meeting with without a chance of him stumbling upon us out here in the park.”
They climbed the granite steps, white in the midday sun, to the east door of the capitol. A highway patrol sergeant opened the door for them. “Hi, John, I thought I’d keep you out of the main security screening points in case the guy you’re looking for passes through one of those two areas.”
“North and south entrances, right?” John asked. “Oh, Brian, this is my partner, Paula Newberry.”
Paula shook the CHP man’s hand and noticed his brass nameplate. “Brian Wilson? Like from the Beach Boys?”
“What can I say? My parents were surf bums back in their day.”
Paula got a vision of Brian in a skintight wetsuit with a stubble of dirty-blond beard. She held his grip a bit longer than she meant to and pulled away when she realized it.
“Nice to meet you, Sergeant,” she said.
“Come on, I’ll give you the ten-cent tour,” Brian said.
The entry on the east side of the building led to a few small committee hearing rooms that ringed the building. The path ahead opened to a wide marble hall lined with glass cases on both sides. Each case contained a display for one of the fifty-eight California counties. Everything from Hollywood to grapes to Silicon Valley tech. No mention of human trafficking, the half-decade-long drought, or California’s other cash crop—marijuana.
Brian tapped out a code on a silver push-button keypad mounted next to an unmarked door. He held it open for John and Paula, and once inside, it lo
oked like any security command center, except the cameras were focused on committee hearings instead of the liquor aisle at Walmart.
“John tells me you’re looking for Charles Sherman,” Brian said.
“Yeah, you know him?”
“Only secondhand. He’s written the governor a dozen times, each letter more bizarre than the last. Not outright threats; it was that rambling, ‘I’ve been framed,’ crap.” Brian’s face changed as if he’d just thought of something. “That’s where I know your name from,” he said, looking at Paula.
“I was the investigator on the case that took him down. Let’s just say that I don’t think I’ll be getting a Christmas card from Sherman.”
Brian led them to a series of monitors covering the main halls and both entrance screening areas. “The legislature is in session, so it’s busy.” He tapped a few keyboard commands and displayed video of crowded waiting areas outside hearing rooms on several floors of the capitol building.
“I locked down the governor’s office and added extra coverage on the floor after you called.”
A screen showed two uniformed highway patrolmen outside the oversized mahogany door.
“That’s it?” Paula asked.
“That’s all you can see. We have executive protection team members inside and roaming the hallway. Have to keep the public from panic.”
“Can’t lose votes. I get it,” she said.
Brian chuckled. “Something like that.”
Another patrolman came in and handed Brian a folder. “The file you requested, sir.”
Brian handed the file directly to Paula. “I had the letters that Sherman sent to the governor pulled. Maybe they’ll help.”
She opened the file, and the first page was a pencil-scribbled letter addressed to the last governor. The printing was small, precise, and spread edge to edge, taking up all the space on the page. In every line, a single word was underlined and darkened from multiple passes with the pencil. Innocent, framed, and not guilty were heavy favorites. One word appeared more often—Newberry.
She flipped the page over, and the diatribe continued, taking up the top half of the page. At the bottom was a drawing of Paula, identical to the one on his cell wall. She held it up.
“What do you think? Good likeness?” she asked.
“Good God. What a freak,” Brian said.
“I don’t think he quite captures the moodiness of the subject,” John said.
Paula rolled her eyes.
“Can we run back the security feeds—say, for the last twenty minutes?” John pointed at one of the screens.
“Sure. We’ll rewind the feeds from both of the main entry points.”
A series of keystrokes set two of the monitors in rewind mode, bodies shuffling backward at an awkward pace.
“There. Where’s that?” John asked.
“North steps,” Brian said.
“That’s our boy,” Paula said.
In the background, a rally of school employee union workers was in progress. There looked to be more than a hundred people, some with signs asking for more education funding and others seeking a recall of politicians who ignored schools.
“He’s already inside. If we had a bit more notice, we could’ve kept him outside the security envelope,” Brian said. The CHP man shot John a worried glance.
“If he passes through the metal detector, then he doesn’t have a weapon, right?” she said.
“He won’t have a metal object on him—that’s all that says.”
“If he’s meeting someone here for a ‘business meeting,’” she said with air quotes, “wouldn’t that mean the other party has to clear security too? This is the most secure neutral territory he can get.”
“That’s a lot to read into this, especially if this is the guy who wrote those letters,” Brian said.
“Brian, we need to let this play out. Sherman is going to make an exchange here. You already have extra security in place, and if he makes a break for the horseshoe, we can move in,” John said, referring to the semicircular ring of workspaces within the governor’s office. “One thing at a time. Let’s find out where he is now.”
Brian nodded, lifted the radio, and gave the east security team a description of Sherman.
“We have a visual: main corridor, near the governor’s office,” a voice over the radio sounded.
“I want at least two bodies on him,” Brian said.
“He used to be an undercover cop, he’ll smell those guys coming,” Paula said.
“I need someone on him.”
“I’ll do it,” Paula said.
“Like hell you will,” John said.
“Give me one of those earpieces, and you guys can play flight controller from in here.”
“He knows you,” John said.
“That’s the point. He wants me here, remember?”
“Then I’m going with you. Give me an earpiece too.”
John tapped on the video screen. “What’s he doing?”
Brian zoomed the image with a joystick. “He tucked a piece of paper into the frame of that display case.”
“That’s it, that’s the drop. Let’s move,” Paula said.
Brian gave them earpieces and placed the microphone wire so it snaked down from their collars to their wrists. They both tossed their jackets back on and tested the connections.
“Where’s he headed?” Paula asked.
“West corridor past the elevators,” Brian’s voice carried over their earpieces.
John and Paula entered the hallway, and Paula grabbed John by the arm. “You watch the drop. I’m on Sherman.”
Before he could respond, she joined the back of a tour group heading toward the capitol rotunda.
“I see him,” she said.
Then her transmission stopped.
SIXTY-ONE
“Paula?” John said into his microphone.
No response from his partner came to his earpiece.
“Brian, do you have her?”
“I see her. Her comm must have gone down. I can’t get a response from her either. She’s still heading toward the rotunda, keeping some distance from Sherman.”
John took a step away from his observation point over the drop so he could cover Paula when Brian whispered in his ear.
“You have three guys coming your way from the north entrance. All white, big, and not dressed for a senate hearing. Biker leathers, seedy-looking types.”
John tucked back along the display cases at the opposite end of the long corridor, more than one hundred feet from the bikers, and watched their approach. As Brian described, the men wandered the hallway, and it didn’t look like they were there to lobby against the motorcycle helmet law. He recognized Junior as one of the men. The taller of the threesome held a cell phone low as if reading a text. Sherman had managed to lure them all here, as he’d promised Paula.
They moved up the hallway, interested in the county displays, checking out the names above the individual glass cases. The tall man pointed at El Dorado County, the one where Sherman planted the piece of paper in the frame. They stood in front of the scene of gold discovery in Coloma, looking nervous and apprehensive.
“The tall one is Simmons. He’s a big boy with the Aryan Brotherhood. The big one is Junior, and I’m not sure about his sidekick, but the white pride tattoo on his arm tells me all I need to know,” John said.
“That’s who Sherman was supposed to meet?”
“Looks like it.”
Simmons spotted the paper’s edge in the fold of the glass frame. He had trouble pulling it out and dug it out with a thumbnail. He unfolded the scrap of paper, and his face flushed. “Fucking games!”
A woman with a ten-year-old boy held her hands over her son’s ears and glared at him.
Simmons wadded the paper and tossed it on the marble floor. He tapped a message on his cell phone with an angry finger.
“Is Sherman on his cell phone? Can you tell?”
“Looks like he got a t
ext message,” Brian said.
“Still have Paula in sight?”
“Affirmative. She’s watching Sherman from the tail end of a tour group by the Columbus statue.”
Simmons had the look of a steroid-enraged cage fighter; corded knots of muscle on his neck and veins puffed up on his arms, ready to pop.
“He’s one unhappy camper.”
Simmons made a phone call, barked orders at someone, and shoved the phone in his pocket when he finished. He paced near the display, and his companions leaned against the glass case with crossed arms and watched the faces parade by. Junior pushed his sunglasses up on his head when an attractive woman in a tight skirt and heels went past.
“Sherman’s on his phone again,” Brian said.
John saw Simmons fumble for his cell phone. The gang leader looked at it and pointed down the hall, and then he and his sidekicks moved toward the rotunda.
“They’re coming toward Paula. Is she out of the way?”
“For the moment. That tour group is gonna move on at any moment, and she’ll need to find cover.”
John stepped from his vantage point into the main hallway and the crowds of visitors, legislative aides, and lobbyists. The leather-clad bikers stood out, making a tail easy at a distance. John snagged the wadded paper that Simmons had tossed.
“Sherman’s on the move,” Brian said.
“Where?”
“Staircase, north end. He’s going up. Paula’s following.”
“Dammit. You have anyone up there?”
“I’ll get them heading that way.”
John followed Simmons and his men to the rotunda. It looked like they expected to find Sherman there. They walked around the huge Columbus statue and peered into the hallways that dumped into the circular open space.
John unfolded the paper and all it bore was a number: “7th.” Seventh what?
“Is there a seventh floor?”
“Nope. Why?”
“Room seven, or something significant about the number seven?”
“No, nothing that I can think of,” Brian said.
From his spot at the edge of the rotunda, John caught a glimpse of Sherman at the railing on the second floor, overlooking the space below—and his pursuers. Sherman glanced over his shoulder and didn’t show alarm when Paula appeared nearby.
Bury the Past Page 25
