by Jude Hardin
So the assailants probably didn’t pick the lock. They probably had a key.
Of course it was possible that Rae was lying about the whole thing, but Diana didn’t think so. Diana was pretty good at interpreting voice inflection and body language and eye contact, and so far there were no indications that Rae had fabricated any of the details.
“How many people have a key to your house?” Diana said.
Rae thought about it for a few seconds.
“My mom had one,” she said. “But I think she lost it. Oh, and I gave one to a friend of mine one time when I was going to be out of town for a while, so he could feed my fish.”
“What’s his name?”
“Ryan Casibler,” Rae said. “He’s a friend from work.”
5
Ryan Casibler seemed to have been pressed for time when he left the diner, so Diana figured he worked the three-to-eleven shift. She told Chief Kearning what Rae Derlin had told her.
“She’s lying,” he said, looking up from his computer monitor. “I have the report right here. I’ve gone through it about a thousand times. There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone entered her house that night. No fingerprints anywhere, and the neighbors didn’t see or hear anything. Except the four shotgun blasts, that is. They heard those. The victim took one in the back, one in the face, and one in each hand. The neighbor directly across the street looked out his front window when he heard the gunshots, but he didn’t see anyone running or driving away or anything. So what happened to the two men who supposedly came in uninvited?”
“It was dark,” Diana said. “They could have parked their car down the block somewhere. Rae said they were dressed in black, with black ski masks. They could have stayed in the shadows. They would have been hard to see.”
“I guess it’s possible, but—”
“I would like to talk to Ryan Casibler,” Diana said.
“It’s my investigation. I’ll talk to him.”
“I wasn’t asking permission, Chief. The army still has an interest in this crime.”
“Why?”
“The actual reason is classified. I can’t discuss it with you.”
“Then why are you still here? Do whatever it is you have to do.”
Chief Kearning turned back to his computer screen. He didn’t say anything else.
Diana left the police station and drove toward the west side. The train was still blocking the Stewart Avenue crossing, so she took the overpass.
Wakeman’s was a couple of miles west of the tracks. Diana pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and found a place near the back. She sat there for a minute and gazed up at the pipes and valves and smokestacks, the grungy maze of iron and brick and concrete that loomed incongruously behind the sparkling steel and glass office complex, wondering why it took such a massive plant to manufacture such a simple beverage.
She switched off the ignition and climbed out of the car. The entire area smelled like peppermint. Thick and sweet. She walked inside, presented her credentials to the guard at the reception desk, took the elevator to the human resources office on the fourth floor and spoke to a young woman named Pam.
“He works over in the factory,” Pam said. “In the packaging department. Is this some kind of emergency?”
“I just need to talk to him for a few minutes.”
“If we pull him off the line, we’ll have to shut that whole section down. I don’t think Mr. Wakeman would be very happy about that.”
“Is Mr. Wakeman here right now?”
“No.”
“I can come back with a warrant,” Diana said. “But then I’ll have to take Ryan back to the station with me, and then you might have to shut that whole section down for the rest of the shift. Mr. Wakeman would be even less happy about that. Don’t you think?”
Pam tapped something into her computer keyboard.
“He’s due for a break in ten minutes,” she said. “I’ll send a message to his supervisor. You can meet him in the employee lounge.”
“Where’s that?” Diana said.
Pam gave her directions, along with a keycard that allowed temporary access to the production areas.
“The pass expires in one hour,” Pam said. “That should give you plenty of time to get over there and talk to him and get back out to the parking lot. If you have any problems, just call the number on the back of the card.”
“Thanks.”
Diana exited the HR office and took the elevator to the third floor. She walked past a lot of doors and zigzagged through some hallways and found the pedestrian bridge Pam had told her about. Six or seven feet wide, enclosed, Plexiglas panels on both sides. It was probably about half the length of a football field. Diana stopped somewhere near the midpoint, just long enough to snap some photos with her phone. She could see most of the exterior portions of the factory, along with the parking lot and the back of the office complex, and she could hear the industrial whooshing and clanking and grinding that was going on inside. Most of the people who drank Wakeman’s Old Fashioned Peppermint Tea would probably never imagine that it came from a place like this, she thought, especially considering the label, which included a drawing of a grandmotherly woman and a teakettle.
There was a solid steel door at the end of the bridge with a sign on it that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. HEARING PROTECTION REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT. Diana grabbed a pair of spongy yellow earplugs from the dispenser on the wall, tore open the plastic package they were in and twisted them into her ear canals. She slid her keycard through the scanner, waited for the robotic entryway to open, stepped over the threshold to an area with more doors and hallways, an area where parts of the factory floor were visible through glass partitions, an area saturated with the din of electric motors and pneumatic pumps and untold gallons of liquid product sloshing around in stainless steel tanks the size of bedrooms. She took the first right and walked to the end of the corridor, found the door with a sign on it that said EMPLOYEE LOUNGE. She used her keycard again and entered the space, appreciating the quieter surroundings as the door eased back into its thick metal frame. She took her earplugs out and put them in her pocket. Ryan Casibler was sitting at one of the tables thumbing a message into his cell phone. Coveralls, nylon jacket, and the same red ball cap he’d been wearing earlier. There was nobody else in the room.
Diana walked over to the table and introduced herself. She didn’t sit down.
Ryan slid the phone into one of his pockets.
“I have to be back on the line in a few minutes,” he said.
“Rae Derlin told me that you have a key to her house, the only spare.”
“She’s lying.”
“Maybe. But if she’s telling the truth, two men wearing ski masks came into her house the night of the murder. The door was locked, and there were no signs of forced entry, so they must have used a key. As soon as they came in, one of them went straight to the closet and grabbed Rae’s shotgun. It had to have been someone she knew, someone who was familiar with the house.”
“Are you saying it was me?”
“If Rae Derlin is telling the truth, I don’t see how it could have been anyone else.”
Diana had decided not to tell Ryan about the lost key. She wanted to see how he would react at being the only possible suspect in Rae’s version of the events.
“Are you going to arrest me?” he said.
“I would prefer that you come along willingly.”
“In other words, I’m a civilian, and you don’t have the power to arrest me.”
“Chief Kearning does. Want me to call him and have a couple of officers drive over here and lead you away in handcuffs? I thought you might want to avoid the embarrassment.”
“Thanks, but I really don’t think I’m going to be leaving the plant before my shift is over.”
Before Diana had a chance to respond to Ryan’s statement, the door to the lounge swung open and two men walked into the room.
Two men wearing black shirts and
black pants and black shoes.
And black ski masks.
6
Diana reached for her pistol, but before she could clear the zippered pocket, Ryan Casibler grabbed her wrist and clouted her in the jaw. A white-hot jolt of pain streaked through Diana’s head, and a million multicolored dots danced in front of her eyes. It was a solid blow, but not solid enough. It didn’t knock her out. She shook it off and swung around and hammered the point of her left elbow into Ryan’s right temple. There was a slight crunch as his skull gave way, like a mishandled egg landing on a granite countertop. As he was falling back toward the steel and plastic chair he’d been sitting in, Diana stomped on his leg and fractured the bone that connected his knee to his ankle. The shin bone. The tibia. Ryan probably didn’t feel any pain as he toppled sideways out of the chair, but he would feel it later. If he ever woke up. His pale and slack-jawed face slapped hard against the tile floor. Snapping the leg had been a vicious thing for Diana to do, especially to a man who was already unconscious—dying maybe—but she wanted to be one hundred percent certain that he didn’t get back up.
The altercation with Ryan Casibler had only taken about five seconds. Not bad, but it was imperative that Diana move even faster now. And she did. In one swift and practiced motion, she unzipped her pocket and grabbed her pistol and swiveled and faced the men advancing from the doorway. They had split up, one on the far right side of the room and one on the far left. They each held a semiautomatic handgun. The pistols were identical, with identical sound suppressors screwed onto the barrels. Even from twenty feet away, Diana knew the make and model and caliber of the weapons. She knew how much the guns weighed, loaded and unloaded. She knew how many cartridges each magazine held, and she figured each man had chambered a round before walking into the lounge. She knew from their stances and their tactical positions that the men had received some advanced training at some point, and she knew that it wasn’t going to be nearly enough to keep them alive.
She shot the one on the left in the center of the forehead. A wad of blood and bone and brain tissue followed the bullet out of his cranium, splattered on the wall behind him an instant before he collapsed to the floor. Less than a second later, Diana rolled onto one of the tables and pulled her trigger three more times in quick succession, drilling three nine millimeter holes into the other man, one in each shoulder and one in the belly. He managed to squeeze off a round as his knees buckled, the bullet whistling past Diana’s left ear and boring into the soft drink machine behind her.
She climbed off the table and walked over to the right side of the room, picked the man’s gun up from the floor, unscrewed the suppressor and tossed it aside. It made the pistol cumbersome to carry, and there was no need for it. Diana wondered why the men had bothered with sound suppressors in the first place. It was doubtful that anyone out in the factory was going to notice gunshots, not with all the clanging and whirring and grinding going on out there.
Diana slid the man’s pistol into the back of her waistband, reached down and peeled off his ski mask. She recognized him right away. It was Goffner, the officer who’d escorted Rae Derlin to and from the interview room at the police station.
Diana patted him down to make sure he wasn’t carrying any other weapons, and then she positioned herself where she could talk to him and keep an eye on the door at the same time.
“What’s going on here?” she said.
Every muscle in Goffman’s neck bulged against the excruciating pain. His lips were contorted into an extreme frown, his forehead studded with sweat.
“I need an ambulance,” he said. “There’s a phone on the wall by the door over there.”
“Tell me what’s going on and I’ll make the call.”
“I’m a fellow law enforcement officer. You can’t just stand there and watch me die.”
“Those holes in your shoulders aren’t going to kill you anytime soon,” Diana said. “A few surgeries and a few months in rehab, and you’ll be okay. The gut shot is a different story. I figure you have about an hour before your blood pressure starts bottoming out, and the pain’s only going to get worse between now and then. If I call an ambulance, they’ll probably give you some morphine right away, and they’ll probably have you on an operating table in fifteen minutes. There’s a good possibility that you can survive. If I make the call.”
“Make the call!”
“Tell me what this is all about.”
“This is all about protecting our interests. Ryan sent a text out a while ago, said we better move fast or the whole thing was going to come crumbling down.”
“What whole thing?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Better get started. The more you wait, the more you bleed.”
“I can tell you about it on the way to the hospital.”
“Tell me about it now.”
Goffner clenched his teeth and arched his back as a spasm of pain swept through his body. Diana wondered if she’d overestimated how much time he had left. His respirations had become rapid and shallow, and the tips of his fingers had started to turn blue. She doubted he would make it to surgery, even if a rescue unit arrived in the next few minutes.
“I’m dying,” he said, forcing the words out in a raspy whisper. “You should go. You should get out of here while you still have a chance.”
Diana glanced at the door. Ryan Casibler had been in the process of sending the text message when she walked into the lounge, which meant that more bad guys would probably be showing up soon. She thought about calling Chief Kearning, but if Goffner was in on whatever was going on, then Kearning might be as well. There was nobody to call. There was nobody in Cordial that Diana could trust anymore. She stood there contemplating her next move, decided it might be best to take Goffner’s advice and leave the facility immediately. Once she was safely away from Wakeman’s, she could contact The Director and let him know that there was some kind of major criminal activity going on there at the factory and recommend that he send in a team of operatives with the credentials to shut the place down and conduct a thorough investigation.
“Last chance,” Diana said. “Tell me why you and your dead friend over there came after me.”
Goffman didn’t respond. His lips were quivering and his eyes were closed and there were gurgling sounds coming from the back of his throat. He probably wasn’t going to live long enough for an ambulance to get there, but Diana decided to make the call anyway. Not because he was a fellow law enforcement officer. He wasn’t, as far as she was concerned. Not anymore. Still, it just didn’t seem right to leave him there to bleed out. She turned and took a step toward the phone, intending to punch in 911 and leave the receiver dangling as she exited the lounge, but before she could take another step, something pierced the back of her leg and a sudden flash of blue light exploded behind her eyeballs.
Immediately aware of what had happened but unable to do anything about it, Diana Dawkins collapsed and fell backward and landed beside Goffner in the widening puddle of blood.
7
Diana was conscious. She could see and hear, but she couldn’t move.
Ryan Casibler must have been carrying a Taser. It was the only explanation. He must have fired it when Diana turned toward the phone. He must have regained consciousness at some point, and then he’d waited for just the right moment.
“I still have my finger on the trigger,” he shouted. “And I still have plenty of battery left. So don’t even try to get up.”
Diana couldn’t speak. She couldn’t do anything. She was helpless.
The door opened and a man walked in. It was another one of them. Black pants, black jacket, black ski mask. He kicked Diana’s gun out of her hand, and then he walked across the room to where Ryan was lying on the floor.
“What happened?” he said.
“She broke my leg,” Ryan said. “And I think I probably have a concussion. We all need medical attention right away.”
“Those two don’t,” the new g
uy said, gesturing toward the right and left corners of the lounge. “They’re both dead. How did you idiots manage to—”
“She’s faster than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Ryan said. “I don’t think she’s an SIU officer. Special forces, maybe. Or something. I don’t know. Anyway, you got to get me out of here, Terrence. I need a doctor, man.”
“What are we going to do with her?”
“Kill her. It’ll look like she died in a shootout with Billy and Kevin.”
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Terrence said.
“You want to spend the next twenty years in a correctional facility? You know what they do to former law enforcement officers in those places?”
“If I kill her, I might be spending the rest of my life in a correctional facility.”
“Just give me a pistol,” Ryan said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“You want mine?”
“No. Billy’s or Kevin’s. Either one. It doesn’t matter.”
“So the ballistics will match up.”
“Right.”
“But if you shoot from where you’re lying, the trajectory’s going to be way off.”
“That’s a good point,” Ryan said. “So you’re going to have to drag me over to where Billy is, or to where Kevin is, and I’ll shoot her from there.”
Terrence looked to his left, and then to his right.
“I think it’ll be a little easier to get you over there by Kevin,” he said.
“Fine. Help me up into the chair, and then you can scoot me over there. Hurry up. We need to get out of here.”
