The Triple Threat Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  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 eleven 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.

  Eli bagged and tagged the bloody gloves, the messenger bag, the box, and the crumpled balls of newspaper. Then he delivered them to the Arizona State Police.

  The Arizona State Police called
the Portland Police Bureau, who in turn got in touch with eBay to find out the real name of the person who had sold Gina her messenger bag.

  LiveFree, eBay staff informed the Portland police, was really one Jerome Harford, a frequent eBay seller. Jerome didn’t seem to specialize in any one type of item, and he had a 99.8 percent approval rating on eBay.

  Jerome was brought in for questioning, and once he figured out that he wasn’t in trouble for his habit of Dumpster diving, he stopped stammering and wouldn’t stop talking. According to him, businesses and individuals threw out lots of perfectly good stuff—shoes, clothes, ballpoint pens, lamps with the plug-ins cut off. You never knew what you would find, which was why Jerome checked every Dumpster he passed. He kept whatever took his fancy and sold a lot of the rest on eBay.

  Including the messenger bag.

  Then Jerome led the police to the Dumpster where he had found the messenger bag on the evening of Cassidy’s death.

  It was just two blocks from her condominium.

  At about the same time as Detective Jensen was being notified about the messenger bag and the bloody gloves, Shannon Coffelt, an Arizona State Police crime scene technologist, was taking a sample of blood from the glove for a DNA test.

  Next, Shannon worked to see if she could get prints from the inside of the gloves. Since the gloves had been discarded already inside out, she left them as they were. She began by inserting a narrow piece of PVC tubing into one of the thumbs, shoving it up until the tip was pushed completely inside out. Since there was no way to tell whether the glove had been worn on the left or right hand, she carefully rolled the entire thumb of the glove, over and over, along a length of black gelatin lifter. Slowly, the ridges and whorls of a thumbprint began to emerge. Shannon smiled and grabbed her Nikon.

  “And you thought you were so smart wearing gloves, didn’t you?” she said out loud. It was moments like this that Shannon lived for.

  In a few hours IAFIS had suggested a match to the two complete fingerprints Shannon was able to obtain. The latent fingerprint examiner confirmed it.

  Neither belonged to Jerome Harford. Instead, the fingerprints belonged to a federal prisoner named Lucas Maul.

  Six years earlier Lucas Maul had had a head of thick black hair. He was also a career bank robber who worked as a team with a guy named Axel Schmidt. Unlike most bank robbers who had no plans beyond writing a note, Maul and Schmidt carefully planned their robberies, staking out targets for weeks beforehand. They also picked times—like right after a department store deposited the weekend take—that would yield the greatest amount of cash.

  Their luck ran out the day a plainclothes cop happened to be depositing his paycheck in the same bank that they were trying to rob. The resulting gun battle left the cop wounded and Axel dead.

  Maul managed two more weeks of precious freedom.

  Even though he had never fired his gun, FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges dubbed Maul the Dueling Bandit.

  He hated that name. It was catchy, and he supposed that was all that mattered to her. Not the truth.

  Then Cassidy Shaw on Channel Four showed his picture again and again on the news. Crying crocodile tears about the wounded cop—who wouldn’t have been hurt if he hadn’t pulled his gun—she urged the station’s viewers to be on the lookout for Lucas Maul and to call 9-1-1 if they spotted him. Which a bartender eventually did.

  Nicole Hedges also gathered the evidence that helped federal prosecutor Allison Pierce put Maul away. Cassidy continued to cover the story, especially when it came out that much of the money taken in the robberies could not be accounted for.

  And Maul certainly wasn’t talking, not even when he was sentenced to twenty-four years in federal prison.

  After his sentencing he ended up on the other side of the country in a federal prison in Virginia. Six years ticked by, years when he thought about the three women who had worked together to put him in prison and the judge who had sentenced him.

  Then the left side of Maul’s face started to droop. The prison’s doctor suspected a stroke, but he lacked the sophisticated equipment needed to scan his brain. So Maul was taken under armed guard to a hospital.

  That night, after a series of tests, the neurologist came to talk to Maul in his hospital room. Maul’s wrists and ankles were shackled to the bed, but the corrections officer still stood in the corner with his hands clasped in front of him, openly eavesdropping.

  Maul was told he hadn’t suffered a stroke. Instead he had an incurable brain tumor. It was twined around his brain stem and couldn’t be treated. Not with surgery, not with radiation, not with chemotherapy. The doctor told him that he could expect to live about a year, maybe eighteen months. It was likely that he would feel perfectly fine until close to the end, when he would spend the last few weeks bedridden and blind. At that point, the neurologist said, doctors would take “comfort measures.”

  Even the guard blinked at that.

  Accepting the sheaf of brochures and printouts the doctor handed him, Maul took the news with a stoic expression. But his thoughts were in turmoil. He was going to die in prison. Blind and incontinent in a prison infirmary.

  Maul was six years into a twenty-four-year sentence, but as a model inmate he could reasonably expect to be released after twenty. He had resigned himself to patiently serving out the remaining fourteen years, knowing that when he got out he’d have almost a million dollars waiting for him. It made the waiting almost bearable. He would be forty-eight, not impossibly old. He could still have a good life.

  Now he would never get that life. Never get that freedom. Never get a chance to spend the money he had hidden. It was unacceptable. If he had only a year to live, he had to be free. Free to go where he wanted, eat what he chose, sleep with whatever woman caught his fancy. And first, and most important, free to extract his revenge.

  After the neurologist left, an aide brought Maul’s dinner. The guard took off the wrist shackles so that he could eat, leaving his ankles still secured to the hospital bed. He said nothing before he resumed his post in the hallway, but his look said volumes. It said, It sucks to be you. It said, Being in this hospital room is as close to free as you are going to get, buddy.

  As soon the door closed behind him, Maul went to work. Shackles and handcuffs were not particularly sophisticated. Most opened with a universal key. A key he didn’t have, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t open them.

  The brochures the doctor had given him were held together with a small binder clip. Maul pinched the metal wire until one silver arm slipped free of the black clip. The arm was already bent at a ninety-degree angle. He slid it into the lock of the shackle and wiggled it. In less than a minute he had both legs free.

  That still left the guard just outside the door. The guard and his gun. So that way was out. The window in his hospital room didn’t open. And Maul was dressed, if you could call it that, in only a hospital gown.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the guard checked on Maul, he found the bed empty and the bathroom door locked. The guard wasn’t particularly worried, except by the possibility that Maul was in there trying to kill himself. A maintenance man was summoned to help circumvent the lock.

  Meanwhile, Maul had already climbed up on the sink, pushed aside an acoustical tile, and crawled up into the ceiling. If any of the patients along the hall had happened to look up from their bed at just the right moment, they might have seen one of Maul’s brown eyes peeping at them. Six rooms down the hall from where he began, he saw what he wanted—a sleeping male patient who looked about his size. He dropped through the ceiling tiles into the man’s bathroom. Later the patient would wake up to find his shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and Nikes missing from the hospital room’s closet, as well as a vase of flowers from his bedside.

  And by the time the guard figured out what had happened, Lucas Maul was long gone and on his way back to Portland.

  Portland, where his money was.

  Portland, where the people who were to blame for his in
carceration were.

  Cassidy Shaw, the reporter who had harped on how he had to be found.

  Nicole Hedges, the FBI agent who had given him his ill-fitting moniker and then arrested him.

  Allison Pierce, the prosecutor who had persecuted him.

  And Nate Grenfels, the judge who had sentenced him.

  The last one, the judge, had already died. But not the rest.

  Not yet.

  But as Maul had made his way to Portland, he vowed to change that.

  CHAPTER 36

  It’s Lucas Maul,” Ophelia said. She had found Allison in the dining room, stroking Cinders. “Lucas Maul.”

  Allison’s eyes opened wide. “He was a bank robber, right?”

  “Right. I apologize for not realizing it earlier.” Ophelia felt her cheeks redden. “I didn’t think of checking for escaped offenders until just now. And Maul escaped from prison in Virginia a little less than two weeks ago.”

  “Lucas Maul,” Allison repeated.

  “I have his booking photo up on my computer screen if you want to see it.”

  Allison followed her back into her office. Maul stared out at them with his chin lifted and his teeth clenched. His dark eyes offered them a silent challenge. Ophelia could see why Angel had called them intense.

  Maul also had a thick head of black hair.

  “He must have shaved it,” Allison said.

  “Or he may have had it shaved for him,” Ophelia said. “I found a story about him online. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and it sounds like he doesn’t have that long to live. When he started showing symptoms—which must account for that droop on the left side of his face—the prison didn’t have the equipment they needed to diagnose him, so they sent him to a large hospital. He escaped from there. I looked for other stories about it, but I didn’t find that many.” Ophelia figured authorities had been embarrassed.