“My knees hurt. That’d be very hard for me.”
“Do it.”
Mandoleras slowly lowered himself to the floor. It was clear that he was in pain doing so. He kept his legs spread out in front of him, not folded in a pretzel shape. The moment he was settled, the cat was between his knees, kneading on his thigh and purring noisily. Mandoleras began to stroke the cat, and it was clear that O’Brien had him well-trained.
Schultz reached over and turned on the lamp on the end table. There was a brief silence as Mandoleras stared first at the gun and then at Schultz’s face. Schultz saw the moment recognition came into his eyes.
“Schultz? What’s going on?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Mandoleras squinted at him. “Damn, man, you got yourself some sun. You should get something to put on that.”
“I’m looking for the man who killed my son,” Schultz said, his voice barely above a whisper and sharp as a razor. “Would that be you?”
“What?”
“You heard me, Ginger.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? That sun must have fried your brain right through that bald spot of yours.”
“You saying you had nothing to do with that?”
“Shit, yes, that’s what I’m saying. I heard about it. It was in the papers here.”
There was a pause while Schultz examined his quarry. The Glen Mandoleras that Schultz had known was a vigorous, hard man, secretive about his private life but a damn good cop. On the floor in front of him was a man who had aged badly: thin white hair askew, the beginnings of a pot belly, legs splayed out, his shorts displaying knobby knees. There was an unhealthy pallor in his face. The only thing that reminded Schultz of the old Mandoleras was the stubborn gleam in his eyes.
“Can I get up now? The floor is uncomfortable.”
“Yeah. Go sit in that chair.” Schultz gestured with the gun. He had already searched the chair cushions and knew there was no weapon there.
Gathering his legs under him and wincing from the pain, Mandoleras awkwardly got to his feet. He limped over to the chair and sat down with a sigh. “Put that gun away, asshole,” he said, “before you blow a hole in my wall.”
“I haven’t heard any proof yet. And I want to know about the little girl, too. You shithead. A four-year-old girl.”
Mandoleras’s face was getting increasingly red, “Are we just going to sit here and call each other names? What do you want to hear? I didn’t have anything to do with your son’s death. Or this girl you’re talking about. Why should I?”
“Because you blame me for Vince.”
“Oh,” Mandoleras said, sitting back in his chair. “That.” The cat jumped up on his lap and made a bid for attention, but was ignored. “After all this time, you think I got a grudge? Maybe you think I got something against Rheinhardt, too?”
“What?”
“Is there an echo in here?” Sitting in the chair had taken away some of his vulnerability, the same way that wrapping a robe around his body would have if he’d been naked. Mandoleras had regained most of his composure, and he faced the Glock steadily. He clamped his lips together. For a moment the two men glared at each other.
Schultz’s curiosity and doubts won the moment. He lowered the gun. “Tell me about Rheinhardt.”
“Our old buddy Victor Rheinhardt got himself knifed a little while ago. Very professional hit, no wasted effort. Tuesday. Might have been Wednesday.”
Schultz hadn’t heard about Rheinhardt’s death. He had been moving fast, and couldn’t recall immediately where he was on Tuesday. He was almost sure he’d talked to Anita since then, and she hadn’t said anything about it. Probably she assumed he had seen it on the news. Suddenly he remembered that night in Billings, when he’d glimpsed Chief Wharton on TV and thought a politician got arrested for drunk driving or something. That must have been the news coverage of the murder.
“It was Tuesday,” Schultz said.
“So who’s this little girl you’re talking about?”
Schultz told him how he was framed for Caroline Bussman’s death.
“Jesus, that’s a hard thing,” he said. “Four years old. Her parents must feel like their hearts have been ripped out.”
“Yeah, like you feel about Vince. I saw the photo of him you keep in your bedroom. I still haven’t heard anything convincing from you.”
Mandoleras shook his head. “Schultz, you are the world’s biggest dumb shit. It’s a wonder you found me. You probably can’t find your own ass in the dark.”
Schultz sat and tried to pull his whirling thoughts together. The timing of Rheinhardt’s death could be a coincidence, or it could be the result of some case, past or present, that Schultz had nothing to do with. How did the message on his answering machine fit in?
You think about that, Detective Schultz, you think about him tied up helpless like that and gasping for air. Then think about what I’m going to do next.
Schultz rubbed his chin with one hand, still keeping the gun trained on Mandoleras with the other. Was Rheinhardt part of a wider pattern of revenge?
“What makes you think there’s a connection?” Schultz said.
“I’m psychic,” Mandoleras said sarcastically.
“What do you know about Ginger Miller?”
“Not a thing.”
Schultz studied his face. Either he was telling the truth or he was the most accomplished liar Schultz had run across in thirty years of dealing with people who would have denied they’d ever seen their own shadows if they’d thought it would shave even a few days off their sentences.
Rheinhardt’s death might change everything. If the connection was there, then the idea of Mandoleras taking revenge for his son’s death didn’t fit the picture. The picture had suddenly gotten much bigger.
“You been back in St. Louis lately?” Schultz asked. He wasn’t willing to give up on his theory yet.
Mandoleras shook his head. “In case you haven’t noticed, this old body ain’t what it used to be. I can barely walk.” He patted his knees. “I’d be a candidate for knee replacement surgery, except for another little health problem I’ve got. Cancer. I’ve got less than a year to live. The most traveling I do is back and forth to the hospital.”
“Tell me how you feel about Vince,” Schultz said. They had never really talked about it. Neither of them were good at talking about their emotions.
Mandoleras closed his eyes. “I never wanted him to be a cop. It was okay for me. I’d been in worse situations, and I knew I could handle whatever came at me on the streets. I was Mr. Tough Guy with more kills to my credit than I could keep track of.” He seemed to grow smaller in the chair, to sink into himself. “As if that’s a good thing. You know a little about that, don’t you?”
Schultz nodded. He’d killed in the line of duty, and he felt that taking someone else’s life diminished a person in some way, took away a little piece of the soul. Or maybe put it in layaway to be redeemed later.
“Vince was different. He was sensitive. I always thought he’d be a teacher, something like that. But he wanted to follow in his old man’s shoes. I almost changed my mind about being a cop then, but what else was I fit for? A security guard? Shit.”
Schultz grunted. “You could have been a private investigator.”
“And take photos of people screwing or tail some jerk of a husband all day, waiting for that one minute of action out of a whole year? That wasn’t for me.”
“So Vince was sensitive. That wasn’t why he got killed.” Schultz tapped his chest. “I pulled that little trick off myself.”
“No. You fucked up by not doing more background work on Lemont Clark. Vince got the hots to make a bust, and you let yourself get carried away with the thing. Vince could wear a guy down, I know that.”
Mandoleras paused for a moment, marshaling his emotions. “It was Vince that got himself shot,” he said. “What the hell was that kid thinking, standing right in front of that
door like that? He should have been off to the side, against the wall. When Clark yanked that door open, Vince shouldn’t have been looking down the barrel of that shotgun. Vince could’ve got the drop on that guy. He just screwed up, is all. And he paid for it.”
“It was my job to see that he didn’t screw up,” Schultz said. His voice was small and came from a long way back in time.
“Gimme a break, Schultz. You know you can’t do that. You’re not God Almighty, last time I checked.”
“So you didn’t blame me?”
“Oh, hell, of course I did at first, because it was easier than blaming Vince. I’ve come around since then. You want something to drink?”
“No,” Schultz said, putting his gun back in his holster. “But you go ahead. Better put those groceries away too.”
“Lucky I didn’t buy any ice cream this trip. Would’ve had a mess to clean up by now.”
Mandoleras went into the kitchen with the bag. The cat followed hopefully. Schultz had his own opinion of who was responsible for Vince’s death, and it hadn’t changed any in the last few minutes. But what mattered was how Mandoleras felt.
There was another factor. The psychic thread that should have been connecting him to Mandoleras, had Mandoleras been the killer, simply wasn’t there. He had felt the stirrings of the familiar feeling when Rheinhardt was mentioned, which he took to mean that his search lay in that direction. But there was no brilliant streak of gold luminescence, a twisting living cord linking him to Mandoleras. Could he trust that absence? Not completely. The cord didn’t perform on cue; it hadn’t in the Ramsey case, and others. He’d have to make up his own mind. Schultz held up a mental finger to see which way the internal winds were blowing.
Mandoleras was no longer a candidate for being Ginger Miller.
Schultz tried to enlarge his thinking to deal with Rheinhardt’s death. Assuming the same killer was involved, Rick’s death and the frame job were pieces of a much bigger puzzle. It had to be something that connected Schultz and Rheinhardt. Since it wasn’t in their personal lives, it had to be in their careers, and that meant cases they’d worked on together.
He needed access to police records. He had to go back in, no matter how dangerous it was for him. With any luck, Anita would hand him what he needed to do that. He’d call her soon. In the meantime, he needed to get to the airport.
Mandoleras came back in from the kitchen. He tossed a tube of aloe cream at Schultz.
“Here, you old bastard,” Mandoleras said. “This’ll take the sting out.”
Twenty-three
CUT KNEW IT WASN’T good to approach a home on foot at 1:00 A.M. A lone man out walking, without even a dog on a leash as an excuse, would attract attention. A patrol car or even a neighbor glancing out the window when he got up to take a piss could mess up his plans. He didn’t want to park in the street either, because all of the upscale townhouses had their own garages and there were few cars on the street. He couldn’t count on blending in, even for a short while.
Fortunately the apartment complex had common ground. There was an open field and a large lake backed by woods. The woods adjoined a county park, and the park was within walking distance of an all-night supermarket.
Cut didn’t mind a little exercise. It would do him good to work off some of those steakburgers.
He parked in the supermarket lot and waited until there was no one nearby. He stepped out of his car, took a deep breath of humid night air, and started walking. The woods slowed him down somewhat, but he wasn’t in a hurry. His dark clothing blended with the night, and he passed through the trees as silently as a shadow cast by the moon. At one point he was downwind, and so near to a couple of deer that he could have reached out and tweaked their tails.
It was the third night in a row he’d used the supermarket lot. If his target didn’t show that night, Cut would have to get a different car. He didn’t want his car to become a regular in the lot.
The lake was beautiful in the moonlight, with the lights of the apartment complex gleaming from the far shore. He skirted the lake carefully, staying far enough away from the shore so that he wouldn’t leave any footprints in the mud. Crossing the open field bothered him, and the first two nights, he’d crawled through the tall grass, getting spiderwebs plastered across his face and coming nose-to-nose with startled rabbits. He’d gotten bolder—or stupider, he told himself—and on his third trip he stayed on his feet, flitting from one widely spaced tree to another.
The town house that was his destination was quiet, and there was no car in the driveway. He leaned against a tree at a good vantage point he’d found and waited.
The street was deserted. Streetlights that were more decorative than functional spread small cones of yellowish light that didn’t reach far into the driveways. Cut watched moths dance with abandon in the grip of the lights, and appreciated the swooping flight of the bats who came to the midnight buffet. Time passed, an hour or a little more. Cut was good at waiting.
Headlights. The car turned into the right driveway. Cut was close enough to see that it was a Lexus, just the type he was looking for. A man got out and went to the door. Before he could knock, the door opened, a rectangle of warm light. From where Cut was, he could see the front of the man’s face illuminated in the open door, confirming his identity.
As soon as the door closed, Cut started to move toward the car. A sudden cautious feeling made him wait, in case the target had left something in the car and came back outside. The Lexus sat silently, obediently, the hot engine clicking. Cut patted the bomb that was taped under his dark shirt, snuggled on his left side. It had ridden there securely for three nights, and would finally get the chance to do its work.
Cut was about to step out when another set of headlights turned the corner. Almost as soon as they did so, the headlights were turned off. That wasn’t standard behavior for a car just driving through, so Cut pulled back and pressed himself against the side wall of the town house. The car continued on past and turned around in a driveway three doors down.
The driver pulled up to the curb on Cut’s side of the street at a spot midway between streetlights to remain as hidden as possible.
Not good, Cut thought. The target was being followed by someone else. Cut thought he knew exactly why, too. The target was in the home of his mistress. The suspicious wife must have hired a private investigator to document the visits. In that case, the person in the car probably had a low-light camera, and that was dangerous to Cut. He pulled even farther into the shadows, feeling sweat trickling down his back. He reached in his pocket for a peppermint candy and found it empty.
There was another possibility—that the police had put the earlier killings together and found the pattern too soon. They’d anticipated his next move and assigned police surveillance to the target. If that was the case, Cut could still accomplish his task, but then he’d have very little useful working time left. He frowned in concentration. The bomb blast would give him a window of time in which no one would expect another hit.
He’d have to go after Schultz right away. Tonight. There wouldn’t be a chance for anything dramatic, so it would have to be a straight hit.
He watched the car carefully. In a couple of minutes, the windows were rolled down on both the driver’s side and passenger’s. It was too warm and stuffy to sit for an extended period of time in a closed-up car, even in the middle of the night.
Cut circled around the rear of four townhouses and came out behind the car. The open front windows were handy. He planned to move closer, aim through the window, and take out the driver. He probably couldn’t get close enough for the skin-touch range he preferred, which would muffle the shots efficiently, but field conditions rarely turned out perfect.
Cut eased the Ruger Mark II with its suppressor into his hand and started moving in. He was glad he’d brought it along. He hadn’t thought he would need a gun, but being prepared paid off.
Twenty-four
AFTER THE MOVIE, PJ brought
Thomas back home with her, as she had worked out with Bill Lakeland. She and Thomas had gone to Union Station, an authentic train station that had been remodeled into a unique shopping area. They’d walked the length of the station, window-shopping, then had a relaxing dinner and taken in a late movie. Rather than wake Winston and Bill up at midnight, she simply drove home. She was thinking that with Schultz out of town, Thomas might as well end his stay with the Lakelands, anyway. She had originally made that arrangement so she could stay out long hours at night or even the entire night consoling Schultz without worrying about someone to stay with Thomas. Since Schultz took off, there hadn’t been much call for consoling.
Their evening together had gone well, but by the time they got back to the house her son was drooping and ready to fall asleep. He took a warm bath and then she tucked him in. Megabite had taken her customary place on his pillow, so he scrunched his head to the side to leave the cat undisturbed. PJ went to bed shortly after him, and fell asleep quickly.
She was jolted by the phone ringing in the middle of the night. She looked at her clock as she grabbed for the phone. It was 3:00 A.M. She’d only been asleep for a couple of hours.
“I’m sorry to wake you, PJ. It’s Bill.”
“Is there anything wrong?” PJ had gone rigid with worry when she heard him, thinking something bad must have happened to Thomas, until she remembered that he was asleep in his own room down the hall.
“No, everything’s fine here. I was just watching a movie and I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, there was a news bulletin on the TV I wanted to make sure you caught it.”
She felt goosebumps rising on her arms. Since Thomas was okay, her concern had shifted to Schultz. Had he been brought in by the police? She waited breathlessly.
“Flip on the TV and check out local news,” Bill continued. “It’s on all the channels. Any that are still broadcasting at this hour, anyway.”
Bill seemed to be rambling. She would do better going right to the source. “Yes, all right, I’ll go find a TV.”
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