McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  The impropriety of Reeves prosecuting Jessup’s kidnappers was one meager little snowball. But with any luck, set rolling down the mountain, Zach’s snowball would trigger an avalanche.

  “YOU INTERVIEWED Perry Reeves?”

  Mike Brimmer wasn’t known for asking questions to which he already had the answer, but sitting in his house on a snowy, lazy Saturday afternoon, off duty, and deeply into the AFC playoff game at home, Cy’s boss had been ambushed. More or less, considering the presidential pressure and attendant urgency of resolving the “situation.”

  “The guy walked in,” Cy answered. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “Wait a minute.” Brimmer waited till the Broncos scored another big one, then muted the TV entirely. “Walked in where?”

  “Byron Reeves’s study.” Cy sucked the foam off his glass of beer. “I went to see his daughter again this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Did Povich turn in a report of our interview with Fiona Reeves?”

  Brimmer nodded.

  “Then I don’t have to tell you it didn’t go well. The old lady had to be drugged to calm her down. The judge’s daughter wasn’t much better off.” He looked straight at Brimmer. “I don’t know whose bright idea it was to hold out on me, but I don’t like it, Mike. I don’t like it at all.”

  “Noted. Fair enough.”

  Cy nodded. An acknowledgment of his anger was all he was going to get out of Brimmer, which told him the decision had been made at higher levels.

  “So you went back to see the judge’s daughter again.”

  “I had a few more questions.”

  “And Perry Reeves walked in on that?”

  “Yeah. She’d taken me to her father’s study. Her uncle showed up there. I introduced myself. Right off the bat he said he’d missed our calls in D.C.”

  Brimmer scowled. “You think he was ducking us?”

  “No. He’s too smart for that—but I don’t think he’s too eager to talk to us, either.”

  Shaking his head, Brimmer flicked a crumb off the arm of his chair. “I don’t get it. You’d think he’d roll out the welcome mat. He’s been Byron Reeves’s spinmeister for thirty years.”

  “Maybe not talking is his spin on the situation, Mike. Anything else looks defensive.”

  “Except that it’s likely to backfire. Forensics won’t get off the fence.” Brimmer gnawed on the inside of his lip. “Can’t really blame them. Julia Reeves’s body was cremated. All they’ve got to go on is the official autopsy—which the coroner—a pathologist, by the way, recanted.”

  Cy nodded. This was what had triggered the investigation in the first place. “Recanted when?”

  Brimmer’s brows lifted. “Almost immediately, is what I understand.”

  “And that’s the basis of the extortion attempt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did the doctor say in the letter was the cause of death?” Cy dragged a hand over his head. “I mean, either she died of the head injury—”

  “Two things,” Brimmer interrupted. “One is that other bruises on her body indicate she may have been pushed, and so fell and struck her head, which takes it out of the realm of capital murder. The other is that she was already dead when her head hit the rock. There were strong indicators of oxygen starvation. She might have been smothered first, which indicates intent, and takes it beyond manslaughter.”

  “Why hasn’t this come up before now?”

  “Because Courson, the coroner, put his change of heart in a notarized letter which somehow failed to surface until a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Now I don’t get it.”

  “Me either,” Brimmer admitted. “The crime lab has authenticated the letter. The paper, the typewriter ink, the notary seal—all of it is at least twenty years old. The type matches an old electric typewriter found in Courson’s home office, and the signature on the letter matches up stroke for stroke with Courson’s signature on a couple of hundred other autopsies.”

  “I suppose Courson is dead?”

  “Yeah. He died three weeks ago of complications he developed after some heart-valve-replacement surgery.”

  “Which is when the letter showed up,” Cy guessed. “So who’s responsible for the extortion?”

  “Courson’s son. Apparently the widow came across the letter, but she’s seventy-some years old.”

  Cy returned a surreptitious wave from Brimmer’s three-year-old son, the youngest of a couple of kids in a second family. The little kid scampered off, snickering at having gotten a wave to Cy by his dad when he was supposed to be playing in the yard outside.

  “Go ahead. Laugh, McQuaid. One of these days I’m going to make a point of coming around to watch you change some loaded diapers.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, old man.” Cy got up with the same old aches. “What am I missing? Why would Courson bother recanting his ruling of an accidental death if he wasn’t extorting the Reeves family in the first place?”

  “Maybe he decided his judgment call was right in the first place and he just stuck the letter in some file and forgot about it. That’s the problem in a nutshell. He’s dead. We can’t ask him. The problem is that Byron Reeves cannot be exonerated by official records.” Brimmer scowled again, this time provoked by an empty bowl of chips.

  “So... what? Reeves’s nomination goes down the tubes on nothing more substantial than a letter Courson himself never made public?”

  Brimmer heaved a sigh. “I wouldn’t count Byron Reeves out yet. Did his brother the spinmeister give up anything useful?”

  “Just a recital of the events.” Cy summarized Perry Reeves’s account, leaving nothing out—not even Reeves’s crudely veiled implication that Cy had gotten something more than answers from the judge’s daughter. “What about the extortion attempt? Was he handling that for Judge Reeves too?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He’s the one who brought the letter to us last Friday. A million bucks or the letter would go straight to the press. Judge Reeves himself was in court. His docket is a nightmare. There was no way he could have—”

  “C’mon, Mike. Are you telling me if a federal appellate court judge summoned you to his home in the middle of the night, you wouldn’t be on his doorstep inside of an hour?”

  Brimmer smirked. “Not me. I’d send you.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Granted. But by the same token, if a federal appellate court judge chooses to have a letter of extortion delivered by carrier pigeon, I’m not gonna argue with him. Would you?”

  Cy polished off his bottle of beer. “I might.”

  “Always the cowboy,” Brimmer razzed.

  Cy shrugged. The shoe fit. He didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, and he sure as shooting wasn’t going to start toadying to the powers that be at this point in his life. “My point is, Perry Reeves had it in his power to head off the investigation when the extortion could still be dismissed as a fruitcake threat—unless ducking us for a couple of days gave him time to fit the story to the coroner’s recanted version.”

  “Christ.” Brimmer lowered his head and kneaded the muscles on the back of his neck. “I can hardly wait till the jackals in the press get hold of this.” He looked up at Cy. “You know what you’re saying? If Perry would do anything to protect his brother, to head this thing off...”

  “Yeah.” Cy nodded grim-faced. “Then why the hell didn’t he do it?”

  Chapter Six

  Sunday morning, as Cy was in the middle of pushing himself through a grueling five-kilometer course, his pager vibrated at the waistband of his shorts. He snatched the thing up, looking for a reason to cut his run short. What he found wasn’t quite excuse enough. The coded entry wasn’t a phone number but a message that he had E-mail, which hadn’t even gone through the Bureau switchboard.

  The sun shone so brilliantly that if you weren’t outside, you wouldn’t suspect the temperature was near freezing. Still, sweat poured off Cy’
s face and soaked his shirt. If he hadn’t lifted weights first, his leg might not be giving him such fits, but the therapists and trainers, he supposed, knew what they were doing when they set the order of his torture.

  He’d have given his soul, just then, to have back the body he had before the Sig Sauer .45, loaded for bear in the hands of a freaking madman, had taken him down.

  A few days ago he’d have traded his soul for evidence that he might have sex again some day. He figured his soul was safer now than it had been with that particular bargain.

  He ground out the remaining couple of kilometers. The return leg of his course was more downhill than up. He ran alongside the frozen streambed that meandered across his fifty acres of prime mountain pasture. A small herd of Angus lowed as he went by. His horses, five of them, were corralled, lazily rolling in the dirt, gnawing on salt licks, breaking out in a frisky fight now and again.

  If what had happened to him had happened to one of his horses, they’d have had to put a bullet through his head.

  He made it back to the ranch house, shaving a couple of seconds off what any reasonably fit woman could have done, and paced off the acid buildup in his muscles outside, then entered the foyer, closed the door and sank down on the cold flagstone floor.

  He rested there a couple of minutes, then forced himself to go turn on the computer in his den and access his E-mail. What he found was a short message from Amy Reeves.

  Working, it said, at a renovation site at 6th and Holly. Need to see you. Urgent. Pack a sledgehammer & lunch is on me. Amy.

  He wondered what she would consider urgent. When he left her yesterday, he thought he might not see her again at all.

  She had promised to contact him if she remembered what she might have witnessed the night of her mother’s death. Even if she had, he couldn’t help wondering if her recall, along with the truth, wasn’t going to prove a moot point.

  It hacked him off, but in the long run, it probably wouldn’t matter. Brimmer was right. The press would savage Fiona Reeves’s assertion that Amy knew what had gone down the night her mother died. The woman was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Her usefulness would be turned into a bad joke, and at best, for all her trouble, Amy would be labeled unreliable.

  What really got Cy’s goat was the certainty that Perry Reeves was playing chicken with them all. He was going to hang for it, and hang high if Cy had anything to do with it.

  First he had to get Amy clear of the hell that might just bust loose.

  He stood under the hot shower for less time than he’d planned, skipped the shave and dressed in Levi’s and a long-sleeved turtleneck. He threw on his sheepskin coat, then his tan Stetson and went outside, cutting across the front yard toward the barn for a sledgehammer.

  The scent inside the barn, the hay, the horsehide, the leather, filled his nostrils, slowing him down long enough to wonder what in the Sam Hill he was doing.

  Amy Reeves was not only the daughter of a federal judge involved in a pending investigation, she was deaf, which for him made any further involvement with her an emotional disaster looking for a place to happen. But here he was, whistling a happy tune, and it scared the hell out of him because he wasn’t kidder enough to kid himself.

  He wanted to see her, which meant he must have lost his ever-loving mind.

  His horse, a seventeen-hand white Arabian stallion, officially “Knight to Kings X,” unofficially Charlie, sneaked up on him from the corral side of the barn and gave him a mighty nudge in the butt, just when what he needed was a swift kick.

  “Funny.” He turned around and clouted the beast on his hard head. He’d swear Charlie was grinning, pointed ear to pointed ear. “Real funny, you clown.”

  He reached for treats out of an old coffee can, and scratched the whorl of hair on Charlie’s face while the horse went through the handful.

  He wondered who usually interpreted for Amy Reeves.

  He wondered why he didn’t just tell the Bureau to find some ASL-competent female agent, assign her to Amy Reeves and let him off the hook. If she never heard from him again, chances were she’d get off unscathed by the events her father’s nomination had triggered anyway.

  The last thing on God’s green earth Cy McQuaid needed was to drive on down to Denver and remind himself why he wasn’t going to do that.

  He was going anyway.

  He shoved hard on Charlie’s chest to back the animal out of his path, and on his way out picked up a sledgehammer, grabbing up a pickax for the hell of it. He slung the tools in the toolbox mounted behind the cab window, then got in and pointed his pickup down the frozen ruts of County Road 45 and out of the foothills west of Denver.

  AMY TOOK A BREAK at ten o’clock, grabbed up a couple of sodas and gave one of them to the neighborhood boy who was helping her load the brick and debris from the renovation onto the flatbed trailer.

  She went back inside and examined the painted brick façade serving on either side as room dividers between the octagonal living room and the dining room. They were not load-bearing, merely decorative, if you could stand the designation, which she really couldn’t.

  The previous owners of the smallish Victorian mansion had bricked in fifteen-foot pocket doors. The construction laborers were scheduled to remove the phony brick façade tomorrow, but Amy didn’t want to wait.

  She needed something to do, something physical, to dispel her tension, to take her mind off the nightmares. A little masonry demolition, something inherently destructive, suited her mood.

  She wished now that she hadn’t E-mailed McQuaid. She needed to think things through. But maybe he wouldn’t come.

  She climbed the scaffolding, took a bandanna out of the pocket of the blue-jean overalls she wore over a sleeveless black T-shirt, tied it over her nose and mouth for protection against the cement dust and began chipping at masonry with a two-pound sledgehammer.

  She’d worked her way down nearly four feet from the ceiling, ridding the wall of the brick façade on both ends of the scaffolding when she saw Cy letting himself in the front door. She gave one last swing of her sledgehammer to dislodge a brick hanging dangerously loose, then climbed down off the scaffold and pulled the bandanna down about her neck. He took off his hat and coat, and hung them both on the newel post.

  “Hi.” She felt... awkward. Jumpy. Her leather gloves got in the way of saying anything else. He was so big. He hadn’t shaved and didn’t smile. Why had she invited him here?

  He cast a critical eye on what she’d accomplished.

  “This a hobby of yours?”

  She nodded, though her renovation investments in historic properties paid her very well. Better, often enough, than her day job as an architect for the design firm of Sykes & Bladestone, where a commission basis meant occasionally lean times.

  “Looks like I’m just in time to help lower the scaffolding.”

  She turned on the heel of her construction boots and moved to the far end of the scaffolding. They worked together lowering the ten-by-twelve pieces of lumber from eight to four feet above the floor. She stripped off her gloves and pounded the dust out of them against her leg, then stuffed them in her back pockets and faced him. He was watching her.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  A few clouds broke loose outside. Sunlight streamed through the plain clerestory windows she would replace with leaded, stained-glass windows, as close to the originals as she could find. “Do you ever smile, McQuaid?”

  “How do you know I’m not grinning my fool head off inside?”

  “At seeing me?” she joked.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you?”

  He delayed. “Yes.”

  She wanted to turn away. Somehow she sensed, now, that he had come as much to see her as to learn what was on her mind. She wasn’t averse to flirting, but this didn’t feel as harmless as flirting normally did.

  She felt reckless because she knew that the pull between them wasn’t going the way of
any idle flirtation in spite of her intentions or his investigation or the emotional turmoil it had already caused her.

  Being deaf ruled out such social luxuries as turning aside with some flippant remark, not if she wanted to see his face or know what he said in answer. The intimacy of this, which she should have been used to, was somehow almost unbearable with Cy.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you here.”

  He tilted his head. Swallowed. He was as answerable for coming as she was for asking. He had the luxury of looking away till he was ready. “We’re grown-ups, Amy. We can deal with it.”

  “I did have a good reason.”

  “I guess you needed one.” He looked around, gauging what was left to be done. “So. Do you want to finish this up now, or talk first?”

  “Finish.”

  He nodded, turned around for his tools, then hoisted himself onto the lowered scaffolding with her.

  Eyeing him, .she pulled off one glove. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “An ugly encounter with a weapon of mass destruction. Nasty illegal ammo, anyway.” He scowled. “I was hoping it wasn’t so noticeable anymore.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  “Why?”

  . “Because I’ve been killing myself just trying to get back to some semblance of normal. So if you noticed what isn’t so noticeable it must mean something, huh?” “Yeah, it means something, McQuaid.” He really needed to shave. She noticed that, again, too. “It means you’re full of yourself.” “Or maybe it means you’re doing a lot of looking.” “What I’m looking for is a set of beautiful old biparting doors behind all this brick.” “Don’t you usually hire muscle for this kind of thing?” “Yes.” “Why not this time?” “Today,” she signed, “I felt like bashing brick myself.”

  His slanted brows drew together. He didn’t have to ask why. She eyed his monster sledgehammer. “Take it easy with that thing.”

  He gave her a snappy salute, then turned and set to work on the middle third of the brick façade at his end. In an hour they had knocked off all the old brick, save across the top, and she could see the full fifteen-foot height of the still-glossy finish on the ends of both pocket doors.