Tail Spin ft-12

by Catherine Coulter

  “I can’t imagine Lloyd’s lawyer not knowing she’s dead, but it’s worth a shot.” She didn’t sound optimistic.

  “What about the fourth guy?” Jack asked. “What’s his name?”

  “Marion Croop,” Sherlock said. “We’ve got an APB out on him, but no word yet.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Washington, D.C.

  Friday morning

  Rachael ladled hot, thick oatmeal into Jack’s bowl. He stared down at it, then up at her.

  “What? Come on, dig in while the steam is still pouring off it. It’s good for you, and I make the best oatmeal in Kentucky. Here’s some brown sugar.” She spooned some over the oatmeal.

  He gave her a pitiful look. “Could I have some Cheerios instead?”

  Rachael punched him in the shoulder. “What is this? Here I decide to cook you my very best breakfast since you’re here as my bodyguard, and reward you because there weren’t any break-ins last night, and you want Cheerios? Out of a box?”

  “With nonfat milk?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Maybe some sliced banana?”

  She laughed, went to the pantry, and disappeared inside. She came out again a moment later. “Sorry, Jack, no Cheerios. It’s either oatmeal or you’re out of luck.”

  He took a bite of oatmeal and chewed slowly, then swallowed.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “The truth?”

  “Of course. Come on, Jack, I can take it.”

  “It’s gotta be the best oatmeal in Kentucky.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but we’re not in Kentucky, you jerk.” She threw a napkin at him and dug into her own oatmeal. “All right, all right, I’ll get you some Cheerios.”

  They ate in companionable silence. It was an odd feeling, Rachael thought, as she watched the morning sunlight pour through the window over the kitchen sink, having someone at the breakfast table with her. After Jimmy died, and the days were empty and passed slowly until she flew to Sicily, she’d begun to doubt she’d ever begin her morning with a smile again. And then someone drugged her and threw her into Black Rock Lake.

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  He licked his spoon and held out his empty bowl. “For what?”

  “You’re here. I’m not alone. Did you sleep well?”

  He’d slept in one of the antique-filled bedrooms three doors down from Rachael. Her father’s bedroom remained untouched at the other end of the long corridor. The bed, in truth, had been hard as a rock and he’d had to stretch for five minutes that morning to get the kinks out.

  “It was great,” he said.

  “I’m glad. You must be real macho. I slept in that bed once and I thought my back was going to break, the mattress was so hard. I’m so glad no one tried to get in and kill me.” She refilled his bowl, not saying a word. “Truth is, I didn’t sleep all that well because every single sound was a bad guy coming to get me, even though I knew you were close, knew I was safe.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I kept my gun right beside me. Yes, the safety was on, Jack. Around three o’clock, I started hoping some idiot would show up and press his nose against my window. Question—if you shoot a gun through a storm window, does the bullet go straight through or does the glass throw it off target?”

  “These windows? Straight through.” He added without any consideration at all, “You could sleep with me.”

  As a simple declarative sentence with only five words in it, it should have flown high and proud. But it didn’t.

  Rachael’s eyes fastened on his. “Sleep with you?”

  “Ah, you know, as in sleep in my bed. I’d be close enough so that even if a bad guy did get in, he’d have to go through me first.”

  Rachael said matter-of-factly, “Yeah, he would. Okay, I’ll think about making you the tethered goat.”

  “Well, I don’t guess I was thinking of myself in exactly that way. Not really a goat. You know ...” He shut his mouth.

  She let him off the hook, but barely. He looked so interested, his eyes narrowed on her face, unblinking. She said, “I called my mom earlier, told her everything is peachy. She’d called Uncle Gillette and, bless him, he knew it was important to keep what happened under wraps, so he didn’t spill the beans.

  “Still, she’s worried about me being all alone in Jimmy’s house, no friends. I think she wants to sleep with me, too.”

  Jack choked on his coffee. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I hope you talked her out of coming here. Three in that bed wouldn’t be good.”

  “I told her I’d visit soon. She’s still in shock that Jimmy was murdered and I’m now a rich woman. She was stuttering when I told her Jimmy left me a full third of his estate. I still haven’t called my sisters, and believe me, their mother Jacqueline hasn’t called me. I want to wait to make contact until this is all resolved.”

  Jack said, “I checked for any leftover reporters camping on the curb. Evidently, they decided there’ll be nothing exciting happening here, thank God.”

  “Yeah, but we should keep a close watch. You never know when one of the vultures will leap out at you from behind a garbage can.”

  He nodded, spooned in more oatmeal, frowned. He dropped his spoon. “Sorry, no more. I’ve tried, but it’s the same taste, bite after bite.”

  “Doesn’t Cheerios taste the same bite after bite?”

  “Nope. The milk softens up the little donuts at different rates, so each bite is a surprise.”

  “You’re nuts,” she said, and grinned at him. “You look like such a regular guy, sitting here at the breakfast table, a bowl of oatmeal in front of you, but then I think about who you are, what you do, and what you did for four years—the Elite Crime Unit, that’s what it’s called, right?”

  He nodded.

  “What was that really like?”

  He straightened his bowl, neatly folded his napkin, stared out the large window by the country oak kitchen table toward the lovely white gazebo in the backyard. He looked back at her. “Fact is, every single day brought new horrors, and you couldn’t escape them. They followed you everywhere, even in your dreams. My dreams aren’t so vivid and bloody now, thank God.

  “There are scary people out there, Rachael, and you know what? Drugging you and tying a concrete block to your feet so after you drown you don’t come back up to the surface—that qualifies big-time.

  “In the ECU, we called them monsters and evil and psychopaths, all to dehumanize them. But what I kept seeing was each of those individuals as a baby—laughing, crying, innocent, and I’d wonder every single day, why? What happened to make that baby grow up to kill and destroy and inflict unimaginable pain and horror?

  “We caught a good number of them, put most of them down, no choice. We saved some lives.”

  “Why did you leave the unit?”

  “Because I knew something would die in me if I stayed. When I first joined the ECU, I was told the time to burnout was about five years, and they gave me a list of symptoms to look out for. One of the main symptoms was ‘feeling death inside you,’ and I knew I’d reached my limit. I only made it to four years. Savich scooped me up before I could go civilian again and return to a prosecutor’s office.”

  “Are you glad you stayed in the FBI?”

  “Oh yes. Savich’s unit is special, all the agents are smart as a whip, the experience level is very high, and they care. It’s a good unit—cohesive, everyone ready to cover everyone else’s back. Sure there’s the mind-numbing bureaucracy, some idiot agents who act like they should run the world, but most agents I know want to do a good job. They want to make things better. I’m sounding like a recruiting poster, sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Jack rose from the table, carried his bowl to the sink, and washed it. He wiped his hands on a towel. “First thing this morning, let’s go to Black Rock Lake. I want to see firsthand where all this happened. I want to trace your footsteps back to your house.”r />
  THIRTY-NINE

  An hour later, they stood together at the end of the wooden dock and stared down at the blue water lapping gently against the pilings, shimmering beneath the bright sunlight. It was beautiful, and Rachael thought, I could be down there, tethered to that block, my hair waving in the water, dead and gone forever.

  She said, “As you can see, it’s not very deep here, maybe twelve feet max.”

  He looked down at the water and felt such a punch of rage he nearly lost his breath. Even though he’d seen and heard just about everything one human being could do to another, this was different. This was Rachael. He said, keeping the violence out of his voice, “Two people carried you down this dock, one had your arms, the other your legs. You said you couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Think about it a minute, try to put yourself back there, listen.”

  Rachael closed her eyes. She remembered the motion, remembered how she fought to come back, to get her brain working again, remembered them speaking, but what? Who?

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Jack said, “Okay, I want you to think about the weight distribution. Can you picture them carrying you? Is one of them carrying more of your weight than the other?”

  She thought about that. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe the person carrying my arms was female. I remember smelling some scent, close to me, not sweet, but not pungent enough for a man to wear it.” She shook her head. “But I can’t swear to it.”

  “That’s okay. At least you were aware enough to pretend you were still unconscious. It gave you a chance.” He paused, then lightly touched his hand to her forearm. “What you did, Rachael, it was amazing. You kept your head, kept the terror away, and used your brain. I am very proud of you.”

  “I didn’t think I was going to make it. The pain in your chest, it’s unimaginable. You want to open your mouth so badly, but you know it will be all over if you do. When my head cleared the surface—” She stopped, swallowed. “I knew they were still there. I could hear them talking, not ten feet from me, standing on the dock. When I got in enough air to convince myself that I was going to live, I slid back under the water and swam under the dock, and waited. I heard them walking back up the dock, heard the car engine. I came up to see the lights.”

  “You couldn’t make out anything? Think back—did you see a profile? Male or female? Can you describe the shape of the car?”

  “No, they were gone by the time I was getting out of the water.”

  “All right. Let’s go back to that diner.”

  Mel’s Diner was charming, right out of the 1950s, with windows all along the front, Formica tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and plastic menus. All along the windows were booths, the vinyl dark brown and cracked.

  “I don’t believe it,” Rachael said as they walked in the front door.

  “That waitress, she’s the same woman who was here last Friday night. Business is light, people in only a few booths, like it was on Friday night. The cook, you can hear him whistling from behind the counter in the kitchen.”

  “Hey,” the woman said, doing a double take when she saw Rachael. “I remember you. Last time I saw you, you looked like a drowned rat. You look fine now, all dried out again. You all right, sweetie? Is this your husband?”

  “He’s my bodyguard,” Rachael said, read the woman’s name tag, and added, “Millie.”

  Millie whistled. “You know kung fu or jujitsu, foreign stuff like that?”

  “All of it,” Jack said. “You always gotta go with a pro.”

  “I’m thinking I’d like to hire a bodyguard, a hunky one like you, to keep that rat ex-husband of mine away from me. Could you kick him in the face for me? Can you kick that high?”

  “Well, maybe a kidney shot instead?” Jack asked. “That’s more in my range.”

  “You could start just about anywhere, honey.”

  They ordered coffee, and Rachael asked Millie about any customers she’d had last Friday night who were strangers to her. There’d been maybe a dozen tourists driving through who stopped in, but none of them had struck her as being weird or nasty.

  She left to pour more coffee into a local man’s cup, then came back, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Last Friday,” she said. “Hmm.”

  She handed Rachael some creamer she didn’t want.

  “I remember this one gent, he came in to get two coffees to go, one black, one blond with three sugars. Now that I think of it, he looked kind of on edge. No nervous tics, nothing like that, but he was impatient, tapped his fingers on the counter while I was pouring the coffee. It was maybe thirty, forty-five minutes before you came straggling in.”

  “What did the gent look like?” Jack asked.

  Millie pursed her lips. “He was maybe forty, longish black hair, sunglasses on, if you can believe that, like he was some sort of celebrity or some asshole wanting to look like one. He wasn’t big, kind of thin, I think, and his clothes didn’t fit him all that well.” She screwed up her face, thought about it. “Sorry, that’s about it. I can’t think of anything else. But I remember thinking I wasn’t sorry to see the back of him.

  “I was pouring a refill for a guy next to the window and looked out. I saw him sitting in the passenger seat of a big dark-colored car, maybe a Lincoln, but I’m not sure. He and another guy were talking, drinking their coffee. Then my boss called me and that was the last I saw of them.”

  “Did they seem angry?” Rachael asked. “Or pleased, congratulating each other?”

  “Honey, I was too far away and it was too dark, sorry.”

  Jack asked Millie more questions, then asked the same ones again, using different phrasing until he knew the well had run dry.

  Rachael hugged her before they left. “Thank you, Millie, thank you very much.”

  Millie patted her on the back. She looked at Jack again, up and down. “You being a professional bodyguard and all, you see to it you take good care of her, all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jack said, and smiled at her. “Millie, do you think you’d recognize the gent from Friday night?”

  “I might be losing brain cells at a fine rate, but I still got enough to remember that face, even with the dumb sunglasses. He’s the kind you wouldn’t want to see in a bad dream.’’

  “Good. I’ll bring you some photos to look at.”

  A man shouted out from the kitchen, “Millie! I got the flats and strips for number three!”

  “That’s pancakes and bacon,” she said. “I’m coming, Moe!” And she winked at Jack.

  Once outside the diner, Rachael threw her arms around Jack, hugged him hard until he grunted. “You’re a genius. I didn’t say anything, but I never thought it would be of any use at all to come back out here. But Millie was here and she remembered me. And that guy. You are so smart, Jack.” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “I’m glad I laid out the big bucks and got myself a real pro.”

  He was laughing as his arms came around her. In the back of his mind, the FBI agent was screaming, Stop it, you moron, are you nuts? Step away from the girl, now. The FBI agent was loud and insistent, but he didn’t make any headway. Jack didn’t release her. In fact, he kissed her back and it felt so good he’d have given up his season tickets for the Redskins without a moment’s hesitation just to keep his mouth on hers and his hands—but the unwanted agent finally kicked him in the butt. Jack set her away from him to keep from yanking her down into the backseat of the car.

  She looked up at him, her mouth open, face blank, eyes wide. She was breathing fast, which his agent self demanded he ignore. She swiped her hand over her mouth. “What? Oh my God, Jack, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just that... I lost it. You’re really smart, Jack. Oh damn.”

  “It’s standard procedure, Rachael,” and that was true, but wasn’t that about the dumbest thing he’d ever said? He took a step back from her, had to. A beam of sunlight fell directly onto her
and he saw the strangest thing. He saw her swinging a baseball bat. She walloped the ball and it flew and flew, and he realized it wasn’t Rachael, it was a little girl with Rachael’s smile and a braid in her hair—

  “Stop being modest. I’m going to tell Dillon how brilliant you are.”

  “Great Balls of Fire” blasted out of Jack’s jacket.

  Jack had never flipped open his cell so fast. “Jack Crowne here.”

  FORTY

  Jack drove down Wisconsin Avenue past a rare-cigar shop and an outdoor-gear emporium, looking for Brady Cullifer’s law firm. It was in an older building, grand-looking, really, understated, standing proudly next to a holistic healer.

  There were five names on the gold-etched sign on the front doors, two of them Cullifer.

  A worried-looking receptionist led them to Brady Cullifer’s office, knocked on the door, waited for the “Enter,” and opened it. He stepped discreetly back, giving them a harried, nearly frantic look.

  Brady Cullifer came around from behind a large, well-worn desk that looked like it had belonged to his grandfather, which, Jack supposed, was possible.

  Jack said as he shook the man’s hand, “What’s with the receptionist? He looks strung-out.”

  “Oh, Rowley, he’s the firm’s major worrier, practically fingers worry beads whenever there’s a big case being tried. One of our lawyers just left to hear the verdict in a big personal-injury suit, so Rowley’s worrying big-time. Rachael, my dear, how are you? It’s good to see you.”

  Rachael smiled, let Mr. Cullifer hug her. She liked him, probably because he’d always been so kind to her, always seemed to accept her. He was about Jimmy’s age, with a bit of a paunch she remembered Jimmy kidding him about, lecturing him to get to the racquet-ball court. He was immaculately dressed, as always, in a lightweight gray wool suit, a pale pink shirt, and a dark blue tie that, surprisingly, tied everything together.