River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  She needed to make one other stop in between.

  A strange, hollow fear crept inside her.

  THIRTY

  FRIDAY: JUNE 8 9:40 A.M.

  Wallace felt like she was standing at the edge of the roof on top of a very tall building. In front of her, nothing but the abyss. Behind her, a man with a gun. In the last fifteen minutes, Burley had called and called and called, each time hanging up when her voicemail prompt kicked in. Then he texted her:

  Word leaked this a.m. that we lost alibi witness. Tasha K demanding your head on a platter for suppressing evidence and agitating for a criminal investigation. Unhappy people with signs gathering around our building. Your name on some. Good day to avoid work and media. Shannon may get boot. Maybe you too.

  Wallace knew Tasha was pulling a stunt for Eddie’s benefit, and she knew it would work. The public would see one more white cop hammering down on an innocent black man.

  Just as she was about to get out of her car, her phone buzzed yet again. It was Barry Gillis, the TV reporter who had called her six days ago, sniffing around for inside information about the Pitkin investigation. She turned her phone off without waiting to see if he left a message, and then did a slow, methodical survey of the area around her and Davis’s office.

  No one was on the street. She exited her car and headed quickly up the front steps.

  She pulled open the door and stepped inside. The sound of heels clicking on hardwood sounded from her right. Barbara Seeley, Davis’s secretary, was pushing a metal cart with dozens of hanging files.

  “Hey, Wallace. Good to see you. Just go on in. He’s not doing anything important. Probably just reading the sports page.”

  Wallace crossed to Davis’s office, knocked, then went in. She pushed the door shut with her backside and stayed leaning there until Davis raised his eyes from the desk and saw it was her.

  His expression was a mixture of concern and relief. “I’ve seen the news. My guess is the media will be staking out your house, maybe your mother’s too. You can stay here, as long as you like, and you’re welcome to one of my spare bedrooms.”

  Wallace closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “It’s been quite a night,” she said, still leaning against the door. She opened her eyes.

  “I can only imagine,” he said. “Well, you were smart to call me. No one will think to look for you here and you can wait till things calm down a bit before you wade back into the mess.”

  “I need you to promise me something,” she said, letting her gaze wander around the office for a few seconds before settling on Davis.

  “Whatever you need. Just name it.”

  “Promise me you’re not going to do something stupid. Something that will make this harder on me than it already is.”

  Davis sat straighter in his chair. His look turned quizzical.

  “I know.”

  “You know what?” He looked mystified.

  “I know it was you.” Her eyes were burning. She was having trouble swallowing and her breathing was ragged. “You were the informant who put Eddie Pitkin behind bars.”

  He let out a tired laugh and dropped his head into his hands. His voice was soft and conciliatory. “I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake, kiddo.”

  “No. There’s no mistake.” She studied his face, wondering how long he would continue his pretense.

  Davis’s mouth pulled to one side and his eyebrows bunched together in a look of strained apprehension.

  He stood and moved around the desk in her direction.

  She shook her head and raised her hand, signaling for him to stop. “I talked to Colin Gerard this morning, before I came over here.”

  “Excellent. I hope the old bastard is doing well,” Davis said. He slouched against the side of the desk, his hands in his pockets, jingling the change and the keys, the look of concern frozen on his face.

  “He’s doing well enough to remember that he never told you something that you told me. He said he told you about how the snitch who fingered Eddie used an anonymous remailer to send his information. But he never told you that it was the Mixmaster remailer. He couldn’t have because he never knew himself. No one could’ve, except possibly the informant who was doing the sending.”

  Wallace stood away from the door and moved into the center of the office, keeping her eyes focused on Davis. “One of Mason’s colleagues, an expert in these things, assured me that only the sender could know exactly which remailer was used.”

  “Did you ever consider the possibility that, way back then, the Mixmaster was the only type of anonymous remailer in existence, and maybe that’s how I knew?”

  “Of course I did. After I talked to Colin, I kept trying to find another explanation that made sense. Any little thing that would let me believe something else was going on. And let me tell you, I tried and I tried some more.” She took a deep breath. “But it wasn’t the only one. You know, I almost couldn’t make myself look it up. My hands were actually shaking when I Googled that bit of information.”

  “Fine. So I embellished my story with a few big words.” He looked down shyly. “Was it wrong to try and impress you with some high-sounding technical terms? And, besides, what possible difference could it make?”

  “If that was the only thing, I don’t think I would be here right now. But the day I tried to persuade you to ask Colin Gerard for help, I told you I had good reason to believe we had the wrong guy in jail for the Marioneaux murder. Do you remember that?”

  Davis looked down at his feet. He scuffed the toe of one loafer against the Oriental rug that covered the floor.

  “You never asked what made me believe that.”

  Wallace waited for a reaction, but Davis just looked up at her with an almost expressionless face.

  “Eventually, when I thought back through that conversation, I realized that you hadn’t asked. So, I had to ask myself why a man like you, a lawyer who makes his living by being relentlessly inquisitive about the facts, why you wouldn’t want to know what caused such a momentous development in my thinking. I could think of only one reason. You already knew. You knew because the leak in my department had already gotten word to you that I had found an alibi witness. You knew and you forgot to make yourself act curious.”

  Davis took a deep breath. “Wallace, please, sit. Your mind seems to be swinging from one slender vine to the next.” He gestured toward one of the armchairs in front of his desk. “I think this case has had an effect on you. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a common occupational hazard in your profession.”

  The gentle smile on his face made Wallace think back to when Davis and his wife had been the emotional support system for her and her mother and her surviving brother. She had expected this confrontation to be difficult, but she had underestimated how sad it would make her feel.

  Davis’s kindly gaze remained steady, his hand still pointing toward the chair.

  “At first, after I figured out you were the informant and that Eddie wasn’t the killer, I couldn’t understand why Marioneaux had to be killed. But all my thinking up to that point was based on the assumption that Marioneaux’s personal evolution ended once he let go of his youthful bigotry. I mean, really, how much can one person change? It never occurred to me that he might aim for yet more distant horizons.”

  “Wallace, please. I know this wild chain of insights must seem totally logical to you, but it isn’t. Listen to yourself. Surely you can hear how irrational this is starting to sound.”

  “So, I asked myself,” she continued as if Davis hadn’t spoken, “what was Marioneaux going to announce at last Monday’s press conference that would make him a target for murder? What was Lydia Prescott helping him with? What was Garrett Landry trying to cover up? The answer, of course, is the very thing that made Eddie Pitkin the perfect fall guy. Marioneaux was about to announce a run for governor.”

  Davis had the benign smile of a psychiatrist trying to maneuver an unstable patient away from her delus
ions.

  “He was going to run for governor and he was going to have some sort of reparations plank in his platform. He saw himself as someone who could steer us through a difficult pass. He and Eddie Pitkin, once sworn enemies, were about to end up on the same side of that issue.”

  Davis laughed quietly and gestured again for her to have a seat. “Wallace, that’s quite a tale you’ve cooked up. But even if everything you say is true, why would I possibly care enough about any of that to be involved in murder?” He gave her the sweetest look she could remember.

  She had just accused him of something horrible, yet he remained so composed. How could he still look at her with such unflinching affection?

  A wry, welcoming smile blossomed on Davis’s face. He shrugged as if to say this was all going to be okay. He reached for her with one hand and gestured toward the couch with his other.

  The warmth in his expression held her transfixed and a tendril of doubt began coiling itself around her conviction. She wanted to smile back at him. She wanted so badly to take his hand. Instead, she spoke.

  “Oliver Harpin didn’t die.”

  Davis tensed. His hands drifted to his sides, and he assumed a casual slouch against the side of his desk.

  “Who?”

  Wallace heard his voice pose the question, but she saw his face fail to produce the correct expression to go with it.

  “The bullet … it struck the mastoid process … that hard knob of bone right behind the ear.” Unconsciously, her finger moved to the spot behind her own ear. “He’s got a depressed skull fracture and he’s stone deaf in his right ear, but he’s very much alive and he’s been chattering away.”

  “So who is this Harper fellow?” Davis asked, his tone less surefooted, his gaze steadfast on the floor.

  “Enough,” she murmured. “Please.”

  “Wallace … I watched you grow from an infant. Watched in utter amazement as your mind developed into this remarkable thing it has become. Even now, after all these years, you still astonish me.” He pushed his lower lip out and shook his head with the smug confidence of a proud parent.

  “I couldn’t make the facts stop pointing straight at you,” she said, struggling to swallow, her eyes brimming. “As you might imagine, it was almost impossible for me to even think these thoughts.”

  For the first time, Wallace imagined she saw something akin to regret in Davis’s face, but it was fleeting. He stayed perched against the edge of his desk, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes drifting up to meet hers, smiling and slowly nodding as if he were listening to a fascinating story about somebody else.

  “I had hoped you would be taken off the case. Or that your efforts could be deflected long enough for this to play out as originally planned. When it became clear those things weren’t going to happen, I thought the noose through the window would do the trick. Given your history with Mason, I assumed that if your investigation posed a clear danger to him you would gladly give it up rather than put him in the line of fire again. I should have known that trying to frighten you would only increase your resolve. A miscalculation on my part. After your second visit to Garrett Landry, yesterday, I knew I would have to take extraordinary measures to protect myself and to protect you.”

  “So, you’re the one who put Oliver Harpin on my tail. You orchestrated today’s revelation that I had found and then suppressed Peter Ecclestone.”

  “If our little enterprise was going to be found out, and there was a growing likelihood that at least some parts of it would be, I didn’t want it to be you that did the finding. There are some who would have insisted on great harm to you and your family. That I could not allow.”

  Wallace wanted to ask him why he was involved in this nasty business at all, but it seemed like such a foolish question. A question that implied there could ever be an adequate answer. She stared at him instead, hoping he might still be able to convince her she had it all wrong.

  When he looked back up at her, his expression broke her heart. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see in his eyes—fear, remorse maybe, but not the casual defiance she saw staring back at her.

  “When Garrett Landry came to us with Herbert Marioneaux’s idiotic plans something had to be done. If his approach had shown promise, other states would have felt pressure to follow suit. It would have spread like an infection and so much that’s true and good would be destroyed in the name of chasing this … this fashionable insanity.”

  Wallace stared at him, a hopeless tangle of emotions welling up inside her. “Is Carlton Lister part of the true and good?”

  “Carlton Lister is an unfortunate necessity. An awful individual practically summoned into existence by the forces he’s being used to thwart.” Davis wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something disgusting. “A distasteful type who proved to have the common touch—that uncanny ability to translate highfalutin political ideas into the idioms and slogans the man on the street seems to enjoy shouting.

  “Once Marioneaux approached that ill-fated campaign consultant Lydia Prescott, the danger became too great. Swift and complete containment of his poisonous vision was our only option.”

  “Doing nothing was still an option. No?”

  “No,” Davis said. He paced in front of his desk. “An entire economy would be ruined to pay for the sins of the long dead.”

  His hands went back into his pockets, and the jingling started up again. “A whole culture would have been thrown into perpetual chaos because of the wreckage caused by a terrible mistake we rectified more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  The circle of his pacing widened until he was in front of the cabinet that concealed his little refrigerator. “So, no, doing nothing was not an option.”

  Wallace tensed as she saw him reach for the door with his left hand. Davis grimaced, then smiled and raised his right hand in a comic don’t-shoot gesture. The door came open. From where she stood, Wallace could see the tops of half a dozen bottles of sparkling water. She relaxed.

  Just as he had the day before, Davis stuck his hand into the refrigerator and picked up one of the bottles. He smiled and raised his eyebrows in a question. He bent forward slightly and lowered his hand, ready to toss her the bottle.

  She released a pent-up breath and then shook her head.

  He shrugged again and the bottle disappeared back into the little refrigerator. His hand went deeper and stayed too long.

  The bluish metal of the pistol caught the light. Wallace rushed toward him, but he was too far ahead of her. The gun thundered and the back of his head flew away.

  She was on her knees beside him, quaking with grief.

  “I lied,” she whispered, her face close to his, her chest heaving as she squeezed her eyes shut—trying not to see, trying not to think. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  When the crime-scene crew arrived they found Wallace on the patio, just outside Davis’s office. Burley and Shannon arrived along with them. The wire Melissa Voorhees had brought her, a few hours earlier, was on the seat cushion of one of the patio chairs. Wallace was perched on the rim of the little pool, in the shade of the mimosa tree, her legs drawn up, her chin resting on her knees. She watched as the water streamed from the Green Man’s mouth.

  Wallace had barely listened as Burley told her he knew why she had gone off on her own. Less than an hour ago, he had caught Curtis Stiles, his special projects officer, taking phone pictures of case-related documents and figured out Stiles was leaking information.

  Wallace remembered seeing the man slide into Burley’s office just as she was leaving the day she and Burley and LeAnne were rehashing the search of Eddie Pitkin’s house. Before signing on with the city police, Stiles had worked as a prison guard with Carlton Lister, where they discovered their shared commitment to segregationist causes. She assumed Stiles was behind her being accosted her at her home, and maybe even the group of women who had confronted her at the Capitol.

  Burley offered to d
rive her home, to get her away from the scene, but she shook her head and turned away without speaking. When Mason arrived a half hour later, she was still sitting in the same place.

  Lying to Davis about Oliver Harpin had been the right thing to do. Still, she hurt. She was shocked that she had been so utterly fooled for so long and that someone she thought of as family had turned out to be so unworthy. But the pain went deeper than that. She had loved him. And love ripped away, even misplaced love, hurt like nothing else in this world.

  She tried to block out everything going on around her, but the murmur of familiar voices intruded at the edge of her hearing—Mason and Burley talking to each other.

  “I’ll do it,” Mason said. “I’ll ask her.”

  “Wallace?” Mason was squatting in front of her.

  “Not now. Please.” She turned away, raising her hands to the sides of her face like blinders.

  “I know you don’t feel like—”

  “You couldn’t possibly know how I feel.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Her trembling hand covered her mouth.

  “You’re right.” He spoke in a low voice. “I couldn’t. I don’t.” He moved behind her and sat on the rim of the pool. He laid his hands on her shoulders and then rested his cheek against the base of her neck. “I’m sorry, angel, but this isn’t over yet.”

  “Oh, it’s over.” Her voice broke, her eyes stung. “Just look inside that office. It’s over.”

  Mason let his hands slide off her shoulders and down the outsides of her arms. He circled his arms around her waist and pulled her closer. At first, she resisted, but then she relaxed.

  He took a long breath and then slowly let it go. “Remember the video? The one my contact in the FBI took of Carlton Lister preaching to the choir from the back of a hay wagon?”

  “Can’t we talk about this some other time?” Her hands came up to cover her ears.