Clive said, “We don’t know what happened to Mr. O’Rourke. I’ll tell you, though, I think maybe he went off somewhere and had a heart attack. He was real intense, always impatient, always demanding. I saw him start shaking once in the courtroom, looked to me like the poor boy was about to fall apart. Do you know he threatened me? I laughed at him, because what could he do? I was already in jail.”
Cindy said, “O’Rourke’s a schmuck, no sense of humor. Clive’s right, he’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere of a heart attack. If he is, I sure won’t miss him.”
Eve said, “I guess you don’t know Mickey O’Rourke’s a great volleyball player with a serve like a bowling ball, and he can spike the ball down your tonsils. His wife tells him he’s a killer, then she punches him, and he laughs. He’s a nice guy, loves his daughters. Did you know he has two daughters, teenagers?”
Clive shrugged and began whistling.
Cindy continued to study Savich, but Eve knew she was well aware of her. She’d come out swinging at her, Eve thought, something she had to admire. Well, then, time to go for it.
Eve said, “I’ve wondered exactly what you did, Cindy. I mean, you had sex with Mark Lindy—it’s your tried-and-true method, isn’t it? And then Mark did most anything you wanted because he was so pleased with himself that this beautiful woman was sleeping with him, telling him he was a stud. Did he let you look over his shoulder while he worked on a classified government project, never suspecting you were writing all his user IDs and passwords on your sleeve while you were cooing in his ear?
“And then you put him to sleep with a nice cocktail you made with your own little hands, a bit of Rohypnol with a knockout drug, didn’t you? Poor Mark, he didn’t have a clue that his sex goddess was knocking him out so she could get to his key fob to tunnel into his computer, and access all his data. I’ll bet you called in Clive to help you with that part, didn’t you? This is all really Clive’s deal, isn’t it, Cindy? He’s the brain in your duo, right? He does the planning, makes the decisions, deals with the buyers, handles all the money, doles out spending money to you, his sex kitten?
“Do you even know who the buyers are?”
Cindy rose straight up, slammed her fist on the table, rattling her chains. “You bitch! I do the planning, I do everything, do you hear me?” Clive grabbed her hand. She shut up, even managed a twisted smile at Eve.
Nice start, Savich thought. Cindy Cahill looked like she very much wanted to kill Eve. The investigative training the marshals were given at the marshals’ academy at Glenco looked to be good; either that or Eve had learned a few things growing up with a marshal as a father. Probably both.
Eve said, “Was it Clive who targeted Mark Lindy for you? Or did some foreign agent set you up with Lindy? Did you know, Cindy, that those top-secret materials were headed for a foreign government?”
Cindy Cahill didn’t leap to the bait this time, but she couldn’t keep the rage from her eyes. She tried on a sneer for size, but she couldn’t mask the mad. “You’re making up a story. The same story that ridiculous CIA operations officer told, too. Do all of you read off the same script?
“Listen up, little girl. What I mean is that Clive is my husband, my partner.” She gave Clive Cahill an adoring look and patted his hand, making the chains rattle again. “He’s my sweetie pie, not my boss, never my boss.”
Eve arched an eyebrow, gave her a yeah, right look. “Your sweetie pie didn’t mind you sleeping with Mark Lindy so long as there was a big payoff? Sorry, Cindy, but come on, now—that was your only role, wasn’t it? That is, until something went wrong. What happened? Did Mark Lindy realize what you were doing and threaten to call the police? And so you gave him the last cocktail of his life?”
Cindy gave Eve a girl-to-girl smile. “In my experience, guys usually prefer beer.”
Eve sat back in her chair. “That wasn’t a bad comeback, Cindy, but maybe Clive could give you a cooler line, since he’s smarter. Hmm, I wonder what your folks would think about how you’ve grown up, what you’ve finally done.”
Cindy Cahill never looked away from Eve’s face. “Since dear old Dad started coming to my bedroom when I was eleven years old, I don’t think he’d care one way or the other.”
Interesting, Savich thought. Did the shrinks know she’d been abused? He started to rein it back, since he didn’t want the Cahills to demand their lawyer, but he wanted to see what Eve would say next. He gave her a small nod.
Eve said, “Clive, if it wasn’t you running the show, what were you doing, anyway? Did Cindy have you fetch her coffee, slide her slippers on her dainty feet, make up her schedule of seduction for her?”
Clive was shaking his head, looking from his wife to Savich, then finally back at Eve.
Eve continued. “Then what is she doing with you, Clive? You’re nearly old enough to be her father, aren’t you, nearly as old as her father who abused her? Tell me the truth, now, Clive, I know it must be tucked in the back of your brain. You’re afraid of her, aren’t you? Afraid she’ll tire of you, afraid she’ll start seeing a guy who’s younger than you? Afraid she’ll take her chances and talk to us, leave you here by yourself on death row?”
Clive’s pale face turned red. He yelled, heaving, he was so mad, “I am not afraid of her! She’s my wife. She’d never do anything to hurt me! I’m the one who found her, who taught her everything—”
“Did you teach her how to kill? Probably not, since the scene at that murder was a mess, not well done of you at all. Poison doesn’t always make a person just fall over and die. No, Mark Lindy fought when he realized what you’d done to him. He tried to take you down, but the poison got to him first, and it wasn’t at all pretty, was it, Cindy? And that, Clive, led the police to both of you.”
Cindy Cahill squeezed Clive’s hand hard. “Don’t you get all bent out of shape about anything, Clive. She’s only trying to play you.” She shook her head at them. “Aren’t you two the cool team? How long have you worked this routine together? Have you ever had any luck with it?”
Eve sat forward now, clasped her hands in front of her. “Do you know, Cindy, one thing I’d never do is kill someone by poison. It’s so—mean-spirited, cowardly, really, you know what I mean? And it’s so tacky. So low-class. Give me a knife any day and let me face down the person I’m going to kill.”
“I am not tacky!”
“No? Then what do you call using your body whenever Clive wants you to? Without the money, without the trappings, who would think you’re worth any more than a fast in and out with a streetwalker against a wall in an alley?”
“You bitch! I’m not a whore. Sue thinks I’m perfect!”
Sue? Who is Sue? What is this?
Savich broke in, hard and fast. “And Sue is walking around outside in the sunshine while you two are on the road to a lethal injection. Was it Sue who tried to kill Judge Hunt?”
Cindy and Clive Cahill looked at each other again and pulled it together. Cindy studied her fingernails and sounded bored. “There is no Sue, it’s a name I made up. As for Judge Hunt getting shot, I don’t know any more than anyone else who saw the news on TV. I have no idea who shot him.”
Eve said, “Come on, game’s up, Cindy. Did Sue shoot Judge Hunt?”
“I’ll tell you again—there is no Sue,” Cindy said. “There wasn’t even a reason for us to shoot the judge, was there?”
Savich said, “Are you so unimportant, Cindy, that Sue didn’t even tell you why she wanted Judge Hunt dead?”
“There is no Sue,” Cindy said yet again, calm as a stone now. “Like I already told you morons, why would we want the frigging judge dead? There’s no payoff for us, you said so yourself. Me, I was sort of sorry to hear it. Judge Hunt was hot, the way he looked at me—” Her husband didn’t say a word, only stared at the wall behind Savich’s head. “I bet he doesn’t look so hot now, does h
e?”
Eve wanted to leap over the table and punch her out. She forced herself to draw a deep breath instead.
Savich said, “Did Sue kill the prosecutor like you did Mark Lindy?”
Clive shrugged. “We don’t know anything about the judge, and we don’t know anything about the prosecutor. How could we? We’re in jail, Agent Savich, not out drinking beer and dancing at clubs.” He sat back in his chair and smirked. “That prosecutor, what a schmuck. O’Rourke would never have proven a case against us.”
But Cindy was still enraged. “All the accusations—it’s entrapment, nothing more. We didn’t kill anyone—if that ridiculous judge hadn’t stopped the trial, we would have been acquitted! Somebody else shot him—probably someone he put away.” She turned to Clive. “You know what, darling? This has been fun, but we got to put an end to it. Agent Savich, we want our lawyer.”
Eve wanted to kick herself. She’d been the one to screw it up, to push it too far.
Savich said as he rose, “I was hoping you two were behind the attempt on Judge Hunt’s life, that you’d hired an assassin to kill him, with the help of your lawyer paying him from some offshore account we haven’t found yet. Now I see that’s impossible.” He flattened his palms on the scarred table. “After spending some time with the two of you, the fact is I don’t think either of you has the brains to pull it off by yourselves.”
“We could do anything we wanted to,” Clive shouted. “And what we want now is our lawyer!”
Eve rose and stared down at him, then at Cindy. “Why don’t you tell us about Sue? You really don’t have to take the fall for her, not if she approached you, not if she’s the go-between to sell the material you stole off Mark Lindy’s computer.”
Neither of them said a word.
Savich said, “Do you know Mark Lindy always liked to say he wasn’t a wackadoodle, like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. He was more like Leonard, funny and kind?”
They looked at Savich blankly.
Savich shrugged. “Mark’s sister Elaine said he readily admitted he was a nerd, and he’d laugh, say he loved Spock as much as the next nerd, but she said Mark knew he saw people more clearly, interacted with them more easily, than most nerds did. But he didn’t see you clearly, did he, Cindy? And it cost him his life.”
Still no word from either of them.
How had Savich known that? From the murder file, of course. Eve said, “Did this Sue tell you to poison him, Cindy? Clive? Did she watch you do it?”
Cindy said, her voice vicious, “There is no Sue, you little dyke.”
Eve smiled at Cindy, turned to the door, and said over her shoulder, “You could be a model, Cindy, but not for much longer. Not if you stay in here.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a model. What idiot would want to live on yogurt and look like a refugee camp survivor?”
Federal Building
450 Golden Gate Avenue
San Francisco
Saturday
Savich and Eve walked into the FBI conference room on the thirteenth floor of the Federal Building a half-hour later, straight-up noon. Half a dozen FBI agents were seated around the long conference table along with Lieutenant Virginia Trolley and Lieutenant Delion of the SFPD, and the U.S. Marshal Carney Maynard. Savich gave a little finger wave to Sherlock and Harry, who were eating pizza out of the same box. Pepperoni, Savich knew; it was Sherlock’s favorite.
There were stacked pizza boxes, a ton of paper napkins, and cans of soda scattered across the table. SAC Cheney Stone swallowed the last of his Hawaiian pineapple pizza slice and waved to them. “Come on in. Help yourselves, lots of pizza left, and probably still warm. Savich, there’s a couple of slices of veggie pizza for you if this crew hasn’t scarfed them all down. Tell us how you made out with the Cahills.”
Savich looked over at Marshal Maynard as he sat down. “Deputy Barbieri did an excellent job, sir, rattled them good. She got Cindy Cahill so angry she spit out a name—Sue. We’re thinking she might be the operative who was the Cahills’ handler.”
“Sue?” Maynard said. “Sue is a foreign operative?”
Savich nodded at Eve as he picked up one of the three slices of Veggie Heaven pizza.
Eve said, “Well, Cindy implied she had a close—maybe an intimate—relationship with her, before she tried to deny that Sue exists.”
Savich said, “Harry, you’ve been looking for their contact for months, haven’t you?”
Harry said, “We thought there had to be someone working closely with them. Their backgrounds didn’t fit high-level espionage. They’ve been talented grifters, that’s all, who’ve been busy rolling drunks and using Cindy’s charms to cheat some lonely men out of their money. This was way out of their league.”
Savich nodded. “So now this Sue is our best bet for the one who made contact with the Cahills, maybe recruited them.”
Cheney asked, “So this woman might be the shooter? You think the CIA knows about this and they didn’t bother to tell us?”
“We can ask the CIA if they have a file on her,” Harry said. “But so far the CIA hasn’t even told us what it was the Cahills managed to steal. Only that it was in the area of cyber-security, quote/unquote. Maybe now we have something to trade them.”
There were smiles around the table.
Eve said, “We might have gotten more out of them, but their survival instinct kicked in and they backpedaled like crazy and hollered for their lawyer.” She sighed. “It was my fault, I handled it wrong, pushed them too hard.”
Savich said, “You did good, Eve, lots better than Harry would have done. He’d have scared the crap out of them. This is good pizza, guys.”
Sherlock, a slice of pepperoni pizza halfway to her mouth, said, “No last name? Only Sue, and Cindy Cahill just spit it out?”
Eve nodded.
Harry turned to Eve, his eyes narrowed. “What did you do? Swing your blond ponytail in Cindy’s direction and watch her explode?”
“Close,” Savich said.
Harry said, “Maybe she was making up the name Sue, playing you.”
Eve could see he wasn’t happy about having this sprung on him. He’d worked this case for more than a year, and he’d never gotten a name out of them.
Deal with it, Harry.
Eve took a big bite of her pizza slice. “Tell you what, Harry, you can listen to our recording of the interview, make up your own mind. Sorry there’s no video showing my ponytail.”
Cheney asked, “Harry, your team never came across this name Sue in your investigation?”
“No, and believe me, our agents”—he nodded to several agents across from him—“we checked through their known associates for months, in and out of jail. Clive Cahill isn’t stupid. He’s always used prepaid cell phones we can’t trace to him, for example. If he was making contact with some foreign corporation or government or intelligence service, whatever, we have no record of it.”
Ten-year veteran Agent Burt Seng said, “The whole operation was skillfully done until the Cahills screwed up and ended up with a dead body on their hands, and got caught. To get any of the confidential information off Mark Lindy’s encrypted computer, somebody in the operation had to know a good deal about the information security system Lindy used to access the project he was working on. Not just his user IDs and passcodes, but enough about the access algorithms and the project itself to know what was valuable and how to get to it without alerting the security oversight team.”
Savich said, “It means this Sue was super-careful. She had to pay the Cahills some upfront money, but you haven’t been able to find any stashed funds, right?”
“Not a dime,” Burt Seng said. “This ‘Sue’ name, though”—he turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith—“you ever hear of a foreign spy with the name Sue?”
Griffin shoo
k his head. “I’m thinking it’s got to be a code name. Maybe it isn’t even a woman, who knows?”
Eve said, “Cindy didn’t shout it out like it was a code name. It sounded like she knew this Sue person, and well.”
Cheney was tapping his pen on the tabletop. “Savich, you agree with Barbieri?”
Savich said, “Yes.”
Cheney said, “I’ll call the CIA operations officers who worked on the Cahills’ case, see if they recognize it.”
Savich said, “I’m thinking I might throw out Sue’s name to Siles, see his reaction, see if he recognizes the name. I told the guard not to let either Clive or Cindy Cahill have any phone calls until after we visit Siles today.”
Cheney said, “Okay, let’s shift gears for the moment.” He turned to Agent Seng. “Burt has been waiting to give us follow-up on what he and Sherlock found out about that Zodiac Judge Hunt saw.”
Burt Seng wiped his hands on a napkin, then clicked on the overhead to show a Google map of Sea Cliff. He pointed. “Judge Hunt’s house is there on the point of land. You can see there are big boulders scattered all over the beach. Since Judge Hunt told us about the Zodiac, we can forget about whether the shooter drove down Sea Cliff Avenue, parked his car or motorcycle near China Beach Park, and made his way down to the beach.” Burt grinned. “Man or woman, this Sue came in by water.
“If you’ve ever been on an inflatable with an outboard motor, you know it’s capable of speed. He could have motored the Zodiac right up to the beach. He didn’t care if Judge Hunt saw the Zodiac, since he planned to kill him. He walked around the ocean side of the bluff and positioned himself in the mess of thick rocks that stud the beach.” He nodded to Sherlock as he put the photo of the Zodiac on the overhead.
Backfire Page 8
