The Last Word

by Lee Goldberg

  Arthur Tyrell was already in the courtroom, as were Jesse and Susan, a prosecutor, and several reporters, who had notebooks ready, pens poised for action.

  Tyrell was immaculately dressed in a tailored suit. He exuded power and confidence.

  Jesse and Susan were both disheveled and pale, with dark circles around their eyes. They stood with their shoulders touching, the only reassuring physical contact they could manage to give each other under the circumstances. They seemed relieved to see Amanda, a familiar and rested face.

  “How are you holding up?” Amanda whispered as she stepped up beside them.

  “Better now that I’ve seen the two of you,” Jesse said with a smile.

  Amanda found herself warmed by the smile, which she returned with one of her own.

  “I’m finally past being terrified,” Susan said. “It took too much energy. I’m so tired now that all this seems surreal.”

  “It’s having Arthur Tyrell represent us that makes it feel that way,” Amanda said. “Our world has definitely tipped off its axis.”

  “I just want to go home,” Susan said.

  “That’s our next stop,” Jesse said.

  The federal magistrate came in through a back door and took his seat at the high bench. He was in his sixties and tried to hide his enormous bald spot by combing over a few strands of hair from either side of his head. It was a wasted effort.

  The federal prosecutor, a stick figure of a woman in a dark suit that made her skin appear white as chalk, spoke first, laying out the charges against Jesse and Susan.

  Tyrell spoke up. “My clients are upstanding members of the community who have saved countless lives. Not only that, but they have aided law enforcement on many occasions. To accuse them of these crimes, on entirely circumstantial evidence, is an affront to justice as well as to basic common sense. There are more than a dozen other people you could arrest at Community General using the same circumstantial evidence.”

  “Susan Travis treated the West Nile virus patient as well as the two donors. Her husband, Dr. Travis, was the surgeon who supervised the testing of the donors and harvested their organs,” the prosecutor said. “And the fingerprints of both of them were on the vial of the patient’s virus-infected blood hidden in the doctors’ lounge refrigerator. The only thing missing here is a signed confession.”

  “Which is what the prosecution would need to convince any jury on such preposterously thin evidence,” Tyrell said. “Dr. Travis and his wife are innocent.”

  “Save the drama for the trial, Mr. Tyrell,” the magistrate said, turning to the prosecutor. “What is your recommendation?”

  “These are two cold-blooded thrill killers who preyed on the vulnerable and the sick. They represent a grave danger to society if they are released,” the prosecutor argued. “We oppose bail and ask that they be held in custody pending trial.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tyrell said. “These are two upstanding professionals with no priors who have dedicated their lives to the betterment of their fellow man. We ask that the court release them on bail pending trial.”

  The judge didn’t take even a moment to consider the arguments.

  “Given the heinous nature of these allegations, I share the government’s concerns. Bail is denied, and the accused are remanded pending trial.” The judge banged his gavel. “Next case.”

  Tyrell blinked hard, surprised. He wasn’t used to losing. He didn’t know what to say to his clients, not that he had much of a chance to speak. The guards were already stepping forward to take them away.

  Jesse and Susan looked at each other in shock. Realizing that they had only a few more seconds together, they leaned toward each other to kiss, but before their lips could touch, they were pulled away by the guards and taken out the back door.

  “I love you,” Jesse called out.

  “I love you, too,” Susan replied, her chin trembling.

  And then they were gone, on their way back to their cells to ponder their uncertain futures.

  Amanda stepped forward, shaking more with rage than fear.

  “That went well,” she said to Tyrell. “Should we bet on my chances now?”

  Tyrell didn’t look at her.

  The prosecutor informed the court of the charges against Amanda and the evidence that backed them up.

  “Given her considerable financial resources here and overseas, we believe Dr. Bentley presents a significant flight risk,” the prosecutor concluded. “We therefore ask the court to keep her in custody pending trial.”

  “Once again, the government is overreacting and overreaching. Dr. Bentley is a respected pathologist and has served with distinction as an adjunct county medical examiner, working hand in hand with law enforcement,” Tyrell said. “She has deep roots in the community and is eager for her day in court. She will gladly surrender her passport and even submit to wearing a tracking device. Given these facts, there is no reasonable argument for keeping her in custody. We request that she be released on bail immediately.”

  The prosecutor opened her mouth to speak, but the judge held up his hand to halt her.

  “I don’t need to hear any more. If the charges are valid, there is no telling how much money Dr. Bentley has squirreled away in off-shore accounts to aid any possible evasion of justice. I agree that she presents a considerable flight risk. I am denying bail and remanding the accused to the county jail.”

  Once again the gavel fell. Amanda wasn’t surprised at the outcome, but Tyrell looked dumbfounded.

  “I have a message for you to give Mark,” she said to Tyrell as the guards approached her. “Tell him it’s Sweeney.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Carter Sweeney and his attorney, Tony Sisk, were waiting in the visitors’ room when Mark arrived. Sisk looked uncomfortable, his brow dappled with sweat, but his client was almost giddy, a big smile on his face.

  “This is an unexpected treat, especially after our last meeting. You seemed a bit peeved when you left,” Sweeney said. “I honestly didn’t expect to see you again until our lunch.”

  Mark tipped his head towards Sisk. “What is he doing here?”

  “His presence makes this conversation an attorney-client meeting, which is protected from eavesdropping,” Sweeney said. “Not that I don’t trust my jailers to respect my civil rights.”

  Sisk cleared his throat. “I want to say, for the record, that I am very uncomfortable with this.”

  “There is no record,” Sweeney said. “That’s the beauty of it, Tony. You can say whatever is on your mind.”

  “This is a mistake,” Sisk said. “That’s what’s on my mind.”

  “Duly noted,” Sweeney said, turning to Mark. “Please, have a seat. Relax. Tell me the latest gossip. What’s Lindsay Lohan’s weight these days? What country will Angelina adopt from next?”

  Mark took a seat across from the two men. “Since you went to such pains to establish that we can speak freely, I’m assuming that you know why I’m here.”

  “Because you like me,” Sweeney said. “You really, really like me.”

  “Amanda has been arrested for illegally procuring and selling body parts through the morgue,” Mark said. “Jesse and Susan have been charged with murder. They’re accused of infecting organ donors with West Nile virus, causing the deaths of several organ recipients.”

  “How awful,” Sweeney said.

  “They’re innocent,” Mark said.

  “Aren’t we all?” Sweeney said.

  “They’ve been framed. It’s a plot that’s probably been years in the making and the execution, and you’re behind it,” Mark said. “That’s why you called me here before, to give me a little preview of what was coming.”

  “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I am the mastermind behind this ingenious plot,” Sweeney said, winking at Mark.

  “Oh please,” Sisk said. “Let’s not.”

  “It seems to me that your past has finally caught up with you,” Sweeney said. “That’s
what this is all about. It’s time for you to atone for your sins, my friend.”

  “I haven’t committed any,” Mark said.

  “We’re all sinners, Mark.”

  “Not on your scale.”

  “Come now, you’re being modest. This facility is full of people that you have deprived of life, liberty, and everything they hold dear.”

  “They have no one to blame but themselves.”

  “The same could be said of you and your present worries,” Sweeney said. “These people that I’m talking about are a very clever, charming bunch. I really like them. We’ve become quite close over the years, particularly Malcolm Trainor and myself. And we all share one thing in common. You, Mark.”

  “I’m touched,” Mark said.

  “One of the problems with prison is that it doesn’t offer a very rich artistic or cultural environment. There isn’t anything to really engage our intellectual curiosity and keep our minds occupied,” Sweeney said. “The fact is, those of us who haven’t been executed yet don’t really have anything better to do with our time than think of ways for you to experience some measure of our living hell.”

  Mark thought of all the murderers he knew who were contained within these prison walls. They certainly had the combined knowledge, experience, contacts, and resources to pull off the audacious, meticulously planned, and undoubtedly expensive criminal plot that had ensnared his friends.

  “Thinking is not the same as acting,” Sisk said. “For instance, you might imagine strangling your nagging wife, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done it or that you will ever do it. Conceding that you may have certain thoughts is not to be construed, in any way, shape, or form, as an admission of having committed criminal acts.”

  “Thank you for that ponderous and pointless clarification,” Sweeney said.

  “Why are you admitting to this?” Mark said.

  “He’s most emphatically not admitting to anything,” Sisk stammered, his face turning red. “Didn’t you hear a word I said?”

  Sweeney ignored Sisk and smiled thinly at Mark.

  “There would be no pleasure in pulling off a scheme like this if the victim didn’t know who was doing it and why.”

  “Amanda, Jesse, and Susan haven’t done anything to you or the others in here.”

  “They’ve assisted you in your investigations,” Sweeney said. “But, more importantly, you care about them. You are feeling their pain. You are feeling their helplessness.”

  “If you hate me so much, why go after them?” Mark asked. “Why don’t you just kill me?”

  “Carter Sweeney is not a killer. He would never hurt anyone,” Sisk said. “This is a hypothetical discussion about an alleged conspiracy that is merely a product of your irrational paranoia, arising from your complicity in what you know to be the unjust, cruel, and inhuman incarceration of my client.”

  “Now that was good stuff,” Sweeney said, nodding with approval. “You should come see Tony’s show in Los Angeles Superior Court tomorrow, Mark. I’m sure he’ll be even better.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Mark said.

  “You’re an old man. Your life doesn’t mean as much to you as the lives of those you care about. Besides, killing is quick. The people in here are suffering. You should suffer, too,” Sweeney said. “The idea is for you to lose everything and everyone that’s important to you, to leave you alone and miserable for the rest of your long life in a prison of our making. You don’t have to be in here to be imprisoned.”

  “Now that I know what you’re doing,” Mark said, “I can stop you.”

  “This has all been hypothetical, right, Tony?” Sweeney said.

  “Absolutely,” Sisk said. “A wild flight of fancy to engage the imagination and pass the time.”

  “And even if it wasn’t, there’s nothing you can do,” Sweeney said. “The job is done, and the people who are responsible for it are already serving life sentences or facing execution. In a sense, they’ve attained a state of absolute freedom to do as they please.”

  “You say that as if you’re not one of them,” Mark said.

  “I’m not,” Sweeney said. “I’m getting out soon. I don’t want to miss our lunch date.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Mercy Reynolds lived in a tiny bungalow that had halfhearted Spanish intentions and was crowded amidst other similar bungalows north of Hollywood Boulevard, close enough to the Hollywood Bowl to hear the music on a warm summer night.

  These were the kind of bungalows that shouted “Los Angeles” to location managers trying to re-create the 1940s for movies and TV shows. Steve felt like he should be wearing a fedora and smoking a cigarette as he approached Mercy’s front door.

  He’d called Community General Hospital first and was told that Mercy hadn’t shown up for work or called in sick. Steve took that as a hint that she’d fled while the attention of the FBI was still focused on Jesse and Susan.

  She had an overly ornate wrought-iron knocker on her door. Over the years, the knocker had chipped away at the paint underneath it. The wear and tear of popularity.

  He used his ornate knuckles to announce himself instead of the knocker.

  There was no answer.

  He knocked again. Still there was no answer.

  Steve tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked.

  He had mixed feelings about unlocked doors. On the one hand, it saved him the trouble of either breaking and entering or having to summon the manager to unlock the door for him. On the other hand, nobody left their doors unlocked in Los Angeles. It wasn’t safe, especially in this neighborhood.

  So the unlocked door either meant that she’d left in a hurry and didn’t care about locking up after herself—

  Or it meant something bad had happened.

  Being cynical, pessimistic, and a police officer, Steve assumed the worst.

  He took out his gun, stepped to one side, and eased the door open with his left hand. The door had opened only a crack when he caught the scent.

  It was the acrid, stomach-churning smell of death. His nose was attuned so well to the nuances of the foul scent that he could almost peg the time of death without even seeing the body.

  What he was smelling now was not so much the decomposition of flesh but the evacuation of bladder and bowels that inevitably follows the sudden loss of life.

  Whoever was dead hadn’t been dead very long.

  He opened the door the rest of the way and saw a woman he assumed to be Mercy Reynolds lying on her back in the entry hall, a bullet hole in her chest and another in the center of her head.

  Steve could tell from the position of her body and the blood spatter on the walls what had happened.

  Her murderer was a professional. That was obvious from the coldly efficient way that he worked.

  The killer knocked on the door. Mercy opened it. The killer was holding a silenced gun. He shot her once in the heart and once more between the eyes after she fell, to be sure that she was dead. He closed the door and left. The whole thing probably took less than thirty seconds.

  Steve quickly walked through the seven-hundred-fifty-square-foot bungalow to make sure there was no one else around, alive or dead, then holstered his weapon, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and rummaged through the purse on the table beside the door.

  He pulled out a wallet, checked the ID, and confirmed for himself that the dead woman was, in fact, Mercy Reynolds, the key figure in the entire case, the one person who could tie everything together.

  Someone clearly didn’t want that to happen.

  But Mercy was talking anyway, even in death.

  She was saying to Steve that her violent demise proved that she wasn’t just some lone, drooling psychopath who got her thrills injecting patients with West Nile virus.

  Her corpse was stating, quite eloquently in fact, that her actions were in the service of a greater goal, one that would be compromised if she ever revealed what she knew.

  The two bullet holes su
ggested that still at least one other person, who had more than a passing familiarity with murder, was involved in all of this.

  Perhaps two people, if Malcolm Trainor was involved. Or three, if Steve threw Carter Sweeney into the mix too.

  Steve’s head was starting to ache.

  He went into the kitchen and noticed a light blinking on Mercy’s answering machine. He hit PLAY. The robotic male voice that was programmed into the machine announced that Mercy had three messages and that the first one was left at 11:10 p.m. the previous night. The caller was a man. He sounded scared.

  “Get out. You aren’t safe. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill us all.”

  Steve listened to Mercy’s two other messages. They were both calls from her increasingly pissed-off supervisor at Community General, wondering where she was and why she wasn’t at work.

  While he listened to the messages, Steve picked up Mercy’s portable phone and was pleased to see it was one of the newer models with a digital display and caller ID recognition. There was a rocker button on the receiver that allowed him to toggle through the last fifty calls she’d received.

  There was only one number he was interested in, and that was the one warning her, too late, that her life was in danger.

  The number showed up, saving Steve at least one investigative step.

  His cell phone rang. He set Mercy’s phone down and answered his own. It was Tanis.

  “I know some things about Mercy Reynolds,” Tanis said.

  “So do I,” Steve said. “You first.”

  “She studied nursing at UC-Berkeley,” Tanis said. “Her boyfriend at the time was David Vogt.”

  “Should that mean something to me?”

  “He was killed in a bank robbery in Pacoima a couple years ago,” Tanis said. “He was a member of ROAR.”

  Steve glanced down at Mercy’s corpse.

  She’d worked at MediSolutions, which was run by Noah Dent, who used to be an administrator at Community General.

  She’d had a boyfriend who was a member of ROAR, the revolutionary idiots Carter Sweeney manipulated into doing his bidding.