Backfire

by Catherine Coulter

  He looked at each of them. “The only answer I’ve come up with is that they think Mickey may have talked to me before they could grab him, told me something dangerous for them, either about the case itself or implicating whoever had threatened him. That would also explain why they tried to shoot me again on Saturday, while they could hope I was still too ill and drugged to have spoken to anyone.”

  “That’s a reasonable scenario, Judge Hunt,” Harry said. “We’re certain someone was working with the Cahills, probably a professional. And the man—we’re calling him Sue for the moment—might have a great deal to lose if he’s exposed. As a matter of fact, Sue did try to find out if Mr. O’Rourke told you anything before he kidnapped him, but O’Rourke didn’t have any information to give him, and so he ended O’Rourke’s life.”

  Ramsey said, “So whoever this Sue is, you can be sure the Cahills are up to their earlobes in this with him; there’s simply no other explanation.” He paused for a moment, his eyes narrowing. “Molly already knew Mickey was dead last night, didn’t she? She knew, and she kept quiet about it.”

  Eve said, “No, I didn’t tell Molly.”

  “The TV didn’t work, either. I wondered why not. What’d you do, Agent, unplug it?”

  “I asked one of your guards to unplug the TV, Judge Hunt,” Harry said.

  “I hate lying here feeling helpless, everyone guarding me, shielding me. I’m pretty sick of it.” He smacked his fist on the bed and swallowed.

  Eve waited a moment until he had himself together again, then looked him straight in the face. “I had nothing to do with it. It was all Harry’s idea.”

  What moxie. Harry had to work hard to keep the laugh in. She was a piece of work, fast on her feet. He couldn’t help but admire that. She’d succeeded in distracting Judge Hunt. Harry saw incredulity, disbelief, and then humor in his eyes.

  Harry said, “Yes, sir, it’s true. I ordered Deputy Barbieri to keep her mouth shut, and I told everyone here in the hospital to keep this from you or I’d have them all fired.”

  “But still—” Ramsey said, but Eve overrode him. “You want guilt? Give me a big share, okay? I allowed you to very nearly get killed in the elevator only two days ago.”

  Ramsey frowned at her. “Get real, Eve.”

  “I will if you will. Listen, we all do our feeble best, and sometimes things simply don’t go the way we planned or we prefer. Did your recovery take a hit from that fiasco Saturday?”

  “No, the elevator business didn’t faze me, Eve. Dr. Kardak even told me I was such a superb physical specimen he felt comfortable taking out the chest tube this morning. They took away my morphine pump, too. I’m on oral pain medication now, and I’m thinking a lot more clearly.” He looked from Eve to Harry. “You two are quite a team, aren’t you?”

  “We’re not a team,” Harry said. “That’s a vicious rumor.”

  “That’s right,” Eve said. “If we were a team, Harry would be saluting me by now.”

  “In your dreams,” Harry said.

  Ramsey didn’t laugh. He knew how bad it would make him hurt. He said, “So you think Sue is a code name for a man? That simplifies things, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a start,” Harry said. “All we can do is keep digging.”

  “If we were a team, Ramsey,” Eve said, “you could count on me telling the boy here where to dig.”

  A laugh came out this time. Ramsey closed his eyes and took some light shallow breaths against the stabbing pain in his chest where the tube was removed. Slowly, too slowly, he eased. He said, “Emma’s performance is in a week and a half. I keep telling my body to get over it and stop whining at me. I really don’t want to miss it.” He managed a smile. “Do you know what a pain it is to have to lie here and let people come in and out and torture you? Amazing that the hospital makes you pay them for it.” He realized he had come full circle. “Sorry for the complaints. I’m a loser. Just belt me.”

  “Nah,” Eve said, “not until you have a prayer of belting me back.” He was exhausted, Eve saw it, knew Harry saw it, too. Not only exhausted, he seemed flattened emotionally, like Molly. She knew he’d think about Mickey O’Rourke’s murder and blame himself for a very long time.

  She watched Ramsey close his eyes. He said, barely above a whisper, “You’ve got to find the worthless son of a bitch who did this.”

  She took his hand, squeezed it. “We will, Ramsey, I swear we will.”

  There were two marshals and two SFPD officers nearby, two outside and two inside the room. Of course they’d been listening. She knew they’d all discuss the O’Rourke murder with Ramsey after she and Harry left. Perhaps they’d come up with something. She knew the deputy marshal who was stationed outside Ramsey’s room was smart and committed to keeping Ramsey safe. Not a single sign of trouble, he’d said when they’d arrived to see Ramsey. She hoped it stayed that way.

  She said to the guards standing by the window, “Hey, has Judge Hunt talked you into playing poker with him yet?”

  Ramsey groaned.

  “What, you haven’t stripped them of their paychecks, Ramsey?”

  “No, not our paychecks,” Officer Mancusso said. “We told him he’d have to fix parking tickets for our wives.”

  Ramsey said, “I tried to tell them I couldn’t fix a thing since I’m a federal judge, not a state judge.”

  Mancusso winked at her. “We don’t believe him. We figure a federal judge has got friends everywhere.”

  “If you win, Ramsey, what will you get from them?”

  Ramsey didn’t open his eyes. “I’m thinking maybe they can get one of their buddies in Contra Costa County to ticket my chief judge’s boat in Discovery Bay. He’s having way too much fun on Cyrano—his big bad cabin cruiser—and drives way too fast. Scares the crap out of the fish. He deserves a couple of tickets, and he needs to spend more time in here commiserating with me.”

  Mancusso said, “I heard the chief judge has friends everywhere, too, sir.”

  Federal Building

  Thirteenth floor

  San Francisco

  Monday morning

  After the forensic team leader Joe Elder and the M.E. Dr. Martin McClure had left the conference room, one back to his beloved lab, the other to his sanitized and very quiet morgue, Cheney summed it up. “So all we have from Joe is a smudged partial palm print that may be identifiable and we know isn’t O’Rourke’s.” Cheney clicked off his second finger. “The M.E. confirms Mickey was tied down and beaten during the two days before he died early Sunday morning. The killer sliced Mickey’s throat with a sharp knife at least six inches long, not serrated, right to left, suggesting he’s left-handed. And last, Sheriff Hibbert let us know the tire tracks were made by a worn Goodyear All Weather, a popular replacement tire for a whole lot of SUVs. So we haven’t got a lot.”

  Savich said, “Nothing from Hammersmith about the Dodge Charger he’s been looking for?”

  “He’s had no luck with that,” Cheney said. “And no useful leads yet from any of the hotels in the city on the man—or woman—who was driving it.”

  Savich said, “After what the killer did to Mickey O’Rourke, we should stop talking about a woman. We all think you’re right, Cheney. It’s a man who killed Mickey O’Rourke.”

  Burt Seng said, “Still, guys, it could have been a very strong woman. Hey, Eve here could carry lots of dead weight.”

  “Not that much,” Eve said.

  Dillon said, “Mickey O’Rourke weighed two hundred and ten pounds, and everyone has described the perp as slender, not very big, so it’s got to be a man, a very fit man.”

  Harry said, “I agree; even the ponytail couldn’t have managed it.”

  Eve said, “I know I couldn’t, so it’s a man. For sure. Now, I don’t think Cindy was putting us on, either, about the name Sue—it was
too raw, too fast. I don’t know who this Sue is, but I agree, she can’t be O’Rourke’s murderer. Maybe an accomplice, but not the killer.”

  Sherlock said, “Boozer Gordon described a man, too, not a woman; there was no question in his mind. So, yeah, good-bye, Sue.”

  “Without those kids,” Harry said, “not only wouldn’t we ever have found Mickey O’Rourke, but, bigger yet, we still would have been trying to fit our killer into a female body.”

  Cheney said, “I say we buy those kids tickets to a Forty-niners game.”

  Savich repeated slowly, “If Sue is an accomplice, was she with the killer when he beat Mickey? Did she question him? Did she tell him to slice Mickey’s throat? If so, then why wouldn’t she go with him to bury him? As his lookout, his helper, whatever? But she didn’t.” Savich stopped cold. He looked very thoughtful, then, without another word, he started quickly typing on MAX’s keyboard.

  Sherlock cocked her head at him, since she knew that Eureka! look well. He’d thought of something, something big. She said, “We’ve been working on a bit of information Boozer Gordon gave us. When the man was putting on plastic gloves to draw Boozer’s blood, Boozer noticed two rings on his fingers. The diamond pinkie ring sounds like the one Mrs. Moe described the shooter wearing when he rented the Zodiac. As for the other one, Boozer said it looked sort of ‘religious’ and actually asked the man if he was a priest. The man said no, he’d won it in a poker game. But still it could be an easy lie. Since it was an odd sort of ring to wear, it could have significance, it could be important.”

  Eve said, “Priests don’t wear rings, not in the Catholic Church, though bishops do.”

  Sherlock nodded at her. “We sent a police artist to meet with Boozer and get a sketch of the ring. Here it is, to the best of Boozer’s memory.”

  While everyone looked at the drawing, Sherlock said, “Even though it’s pretty rough, we sent the sketch back to the Hoover Building. Given all the ecclesiastical rings I looked at on the Internet, Boozer’s description of the ring isn’t far off. We should know soon if our people can find anything.” But Sherlock didn’t look hopeful.

  Harry pointed to the sketch. “The ring does look faintly religious. I hope you’re right and it’s important to this guy, for whatever reason.”

  “Well, well, would you look at this,” Savich said. He looked down at MAX again for a moment, then smiled at everyone. “In all the talking we’ve done about Sue, we’ve assumed Sue is an American woman because it’s an American name, short for Susan. But it occurred to me to ask if there are names in other languages that sound like Sue, since this case revolves around espionage. I ran it as a search through MAX, and it turns out there are names in Chinese that are pronounced Sue, or close to it. The closest one is a family name, written in English as X-u or S-u. Either way, since it’s a surname it can be a man or woman’s name, but no matter, I’d say Xu is a man and very probably Chinese.”

  Cheney rose straight up, slammed his fist to the table. “That’s got to be right! It fits too well not to be. It all makes sense now. The Cahills had a Chinese handler named Xu who probably recruited them to get access to Mark Lindy’s classified information. Question is, why is Xu still in the country? Why is he still around more than eight months after the Cahills were arrested?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to clean things up before he checks out,” Harry said.

  Eve said, “To stay here over eight months, he’d have to be an American citizen, whether he’s working for the Chinese or not, or have excellent fake papers.”

  Harry said, “And the reason he’s still here is because the Cahills know exactly who he is, and they could announce his identity to the world at any moment they liked.”

  Savich said, “Say Xu is an agent for the Chinese. They can’t be happy with him that the simple retrieval of information of Mark Lindy’s data—meant to be done with stealth and alert no one it was even taken—turned instead into the very messy murder of a U.S. citizen, one working for the federal government. Imagine if it got out that Chinese intelligence was responsible, and the press got ahold of it—heads would roll. This Xu’s continued usefulness to his employer, maybe even his life, might depend on the Cahills keeping their secrets. He had no choice but to stay here.”

  Cheney said, “So Xu had to try to get the Cahills off, or make them think he would, to prevent them from giving him up.”

  Cheney said, “I wonder if the CIA already suspects Chinese involvement? If so, they probably beat us to this Xu name days ago.”

  Savich said, “I’ll speak to Billy Hammond at the CIA again, give him a heads-up. They’re much better placed to follow this up quickly, if they haven’t already.”

  “Will he tell you the truth?” Eve asked him.

  “I suppose it’s a vague possibility. On the other hand, Hammond was a stone wall when I asked him what kind of intelligence the Cahills were after on Lindy’s computer.”

  “It’s possible they don’t know,” Eve said. “I mean, who knew the Forty-niners would be having a winning season?”

  They were interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “Come,” Cheney called.

  The door opened to Agent Andre Devereau. Behind Andre stood Molly Hunt.

  “She needs to see you, Cheney, so I brought her back.” Cheney nodded, and Agent Devereau closed the door behind Molly.

  Eve was on her feet. “Molly? What’s happened? Are you all right?”

  Molly was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, sneakers on her feet. Her vivid red hair was wild around her head, no makeup on her face. She looked like a teenager.

  She said to Eve, “A phone call came in a half-hour ago. You told me never to pick up, and to record every call, and I did. I didn’t want to stay there and wait, so I came right over. Eve, call my home number. The voice mail access code is one-five-five-nine.”

  Eve picked up the landline and punched the speakerphone. She dialed Molly’s number, and they all heard it ring, heard her punch in the code. There was the date and time, then a muffled gravelly voice.

  “Mrs. Hunt, the mole on the back of your left thigh is very sexy. I’m thinking you and I will get together after your murderer husband is underground. It will be you and me and Emma. She can teach me to play the piano, and I can teach her—other things. The murdering bastard won’t be with us much longer, Molly—may I call you Molly? I’ll come for you, I promise.”

  Eve knew if she even breathed deeply everyone would hear it as she pressed the stop button.

  Molly stood as pale as the morning fog snaking over the bay behind her, her hands clenched at her sides. But when she spoke, her voice was calm. “I can’t figure out why he called Ramsey a murderer.”

  “He said it twice,” Sherlock said. “Does he believe Ramsey is a murderer because he was presiding over a death penalty trial—namely, the Cahills’?”

  Eve walked to Molly, placed her hands on her shoulders. She looked her right in the eye. “Molly, how could this guy have seen you naked?”

  Molly ran her tongue along her bottom lip. “The bathroom has a large window looking out at the ocean, right beside the Jacuzzi. Ramsey and I like to—” She broke off, swallowed. “There are blinds, but we never use them. There are no neighbors to look in, after all, and it’s a direct view to the ocean and the headlands beyond.”

  Harry said, “Too far from the water to see a mole, even with binoculars. So he may have managed to sneak up to the back of the house and look in on you without your seeing him. It could have been any time, even before he shot Ramsey. Think, Molly. Do you remember anything—maybe a shadow you couldn’t identify, a flash of movement out of the corner of your eye?”

  Molly shook her head. “It was raining last night while I was bathing. When I looked at the window, I only saw the raindrops streaming down the glass, nothing else, I’m sure.”

  �
�He could have managed to get to the window unseen by the deputies guarding the house,” Eve said. “It’s a big property, with lots of ways in, if one climbs the cliff or sneaks through Mr. Sproole’s yard. It’s a huge risk to take, though. It’s more likely he saw you a week or more ago. When he was planning to shoot Ramsey.”

  Sherlock said, “Molly, did you tell the marshals?”

  Molly nodded. “They weren’t happy. They checked around the house right away, but they didn’t find anything. You know the rain was heavy.”

  Molly stared at each of them in turn. “He’s going to kill Ramsey unless you find him. How many more times can he fail? He was promising me, you heard the certainty in his voice. He’s going to kill Ramsey.”

  Savich hated the despair in her voice, and he snapped her back. “Molly, have you taken a bath every night since last Thursday night when Ramsey was shot?”

  She started. “Well, no. I’ve been so exhausted, I’ve hopped in and out of the shower, but last night—” She gave a hoarse laugh. “Last night I needed to calm myself down, get it together for the children. I soaked for a good thirty minutes. And maybe he was outside, watching me, and I didn’t know it—I was lying there, my eyes closed, and I was so thankful Ramsey had survived the elevator attack—” She looked at them blindly. “I know he was there watching me, all the time, he was watching me.”

  And in everyone’s mind—Could he have gotten to her last night, broken into the house without alerting the marshals outside?

  Sherlock said with infinite calm, “He’s not going to try to take you. His whole purpose is to terrify you, to scatter your focus, and our focus. The best thing for your peace of mind, and for ours, would be to take you and the kids to a safe house for the duration.”

  Cheney nodded. “I can arrange it.”

  Molly said, “That’s like in the movies. I can’t believe any of this, it’s all so surreal, and Ramsey—” She broke off, pulled herself together, cleared her throat. “All right. Good. I’ll try to make the boys think it’s a mini-vacation, maybe down by the zoo? We’ll need to transport Emma’s piano, since she plays at Davies Hall in a week and a half.”