by Mark Pryor
“That won’t be cold,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m just killing time until they clear out.” I nodded to the door to indicate the journalists.
“Didn’t take you for the shy kind. Then again, you never really know anyone, do you?”
“Meaning?”
“Great show, by the way, I’ve never heard your music but it was good. Really good.”
“Thanks.”
“Welcome,” he said. “You know, I talked to him recently.”
“Talked to who?”
“Brian McNulty. I met with him at your offices and thought he was kind of a wet fish. You know, not very bright, not very interesting. And then he does all this.”
“All this?” I asked. “I guess I’m still not clear about exactly what he did.” Which is to say, what is it exactly that you think he did?
“Well, it looks like he started by blackmailing Judge Portnoy.”
“Are you serious?”
He gave me a look. “It’s OK; I know you know. The judge came forward and did the right thing after we found his body. Phoned us Saturday night.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I told her to report it in the first place, when she first came to me.”
“We know, don’t worry you didn’t do anything wrong. And I certainly don’t blame her for trying to keep something like that secret; it’s a normal human instinct.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Anyway,” Brannon continued. “We’re still looking into the connection between him and Tristan Bell; I can’t wait to find out how they hooked up.”
“You’re sure they did?”
“He took out two grand from his bank account. His girlfriend knew nothing about it.”
“Sneaky bastard.”
“Yeah. If I had to guess I’d say Bell and McNulty were friends back in the day and y’all just didn’t know it, although it’s possible they got to know each other after his arrest. People like Bell attract all kind of attention, from people you wouldn’t believe. Anyway, Bell and White must’ve gotten cozy in jail, and Bell put him onto McNulty. Two thousand bucks is a lot of money for someone who’s been in and out of jail for the past decade.”
“I’m sure. But how would Tristan pay back Brian?”
“No idea. Maybe McNulty was already indebted to him; this was paying him back.”
“I suppose that’s possible. You said you don’t know how he and White got together?”
“Not yet. I do know that they communicated via phone, no texts. We found a burner phone on White’s body, a couple of calls had been made to it from the one we found on McNulty. Same make of phone, too, he probably bought a few of them to use.”
“Sounds like it. So do you think McNulty killed himself?”
“We do. Once he heard that White was dead, he figured he’d finish the job himself—hence the text to you to meet him at that time and place. When you didn’t show up, I can only assume he got to thinking and realized there was no way we wouldn’t catch him.”
“For the blackmail?”
“That and the conspiracy to kill you,” Brannon said. “With White dead, McNulty would have known that we could go through White’s stuff and find out why he was after you, who was helping him. Being a prosecutor, McNulty would’ve known how thorough we’d be and that we’d figure out his role. Like I say, he probably got to thinking about it when you didn’t show up, and realized he was in a corner.”
“Seems extreme to go from wanting to kill me to killing himself.”
“Not really,” Brannon shook his head. “Do you have any idea how a prosecutor would fair in prison? Let alone one with McNulty’s personality and presence?”
“Good point.” I wondered if he had a theory for why poor Brian might choose that location to kill me. No harm in asking, right? “Why there do you suppose?”
“I can only think he wanted an abandoned property far away from his place. I expect he heard about it from you, or someone else, talking about that kid being murdered there. We know he’d been there before, though, probably to scout the place.”
How’s that possible? “How do you know?”
“Beer cans. Some in the bedroom with his prints—we missed them first time we went through the house, just because we weren’t really looking for anyone else.”
“Beer cans?” If he bothered to test the liquid left inside those cans, he’d discover large doses of Flunitrazepam, also known as “roofies.” Which might lead him to think Brian had dosed Bobby and brought him here to kill him. I was fine with the current working theory, though—no need to make things too complicated.
“Guinness, to be precise. Dutch courage. Probably drank them while picturing what he planned to do, help him get through it.” Brannon shrugged. “That’s just a guess, of course.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ELIZABETH
I don’t know why I went to see Dominic perform that night at Club Steamboat. I think I wanted to throw him off a little, make some kind of power play. I dressed the way I had when I first caught his eye, and I lingered at the back of the room, watching him play the crowd like the puppets they were. Maybe that’s it, I wanted him to know that in a world of puppets, I wasn’t one of them.
If I had to guess, I’d say Sergeant Brannon wasn’t either, but he did look defeated in his hat and cop coat. I thought about going over and talking to him, feeling him out a little, and I know he spent a fair amount of time looking my way. But that might have made Dominic mad, and if there was one lesson from the past year of my life I’d taken to heart, it was that making Dominic mad ended very, very badly for whoever had done so.
I didn’t see Dominic again after that night. I noticed his picture in the paper two months later, shaking Judge Portnoy’s hand as he was sworn in as the new Associate Juvenile Court Judge. Of course, I didn’t see Barbara again, either. She was gun-shy, and since most of our relationship was based on me looking out for Bobby, I had no more reason to pursue her.
Not many people showed up to Bobby’s funeral. A couple of his friends, his probation officer. The highlight was when members of two rival gangs ran into each other at the cemetery gates. That resulted in a lot of posturing and everyone walking away shouting insults. I suppose I should be grateful that there was no fight, that none of them came in.
Jeremy Brannon did, though. I wondered if he was waiting to see whether Dominic appeared, even though I knew that wasn’t going to happen. After the brief service, Brannon came up to me and shook my hand.
“I’m sorry for your loss, truly,” he said.
“Thank you.” He held onto my hand just a moment too long, and it clicked as to why he was really there. “It’s kind of you to come.”
“Of course. Was it just the two of you?”
“Yes.” I didn’t feel like answering questions, and I should’ve been annoyed that he showed up to my brother’s funeral to make a pass at me. At least he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring ; that made a nice change. In another time and place I might have thought of taking him on as a project. He was good-looking, had a decent job, and seemed nice, kind. But I liked to fuck with authority, not the other way around, and after my recent dalliances I was starting to think that “nice and kind” might become a little boring after a while. A very short while.
I thought about Brian McNulty quite a lot. About innocence and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. About luck. Specifically bad luck. Bobby had been unlucky with his genes. I guess Dominic was, too. Was I lucky he spotted me at the bus stop? No, that was by design. My design. So what was it that put him in my life for the past year? Good luck or bad? Good planning or bad?
The thing is, none of us is responsible for where we start in life. I can’t help my emotional detachment, my shitty parents, my addict aunt. All I can do is try to improve my life, and while I tried to do that without stepping all over other people, I was starting to believe that maybe that was inevitable sometimes. I do know that I can’t be responsible for sa
ving the likes of Brian McNulty and, while it’s true that I did a lot more than “not save” him, it’s also true that I had to choose between his life and mine. Who in the world would have chosen differently?
That saying about three people keeping a secret turned out to be wrong, too. Dominic and I had all kinds of secrets going on, and we managed to keep them from the world. Add Barbara Portnoy to the mix, and you have to admit that three can keep a secret. Although I’m pretty sure Dominic will break that one out and use it against her if he needs to.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m worse than him, than Dominic. I prodded him to pull that heist, I used my body to control him, to control a district judge, and I killed someone. Yes, I can find excuses or reasons for all of it, rationalizations—but that just makes me like Dominic, thinking that the ends justify the means. And he has an excuse built in, a design flaw that I don’t have. . . . That’s why I wonder if I’m a worse person than he is.
I’m not, though, I know that. You see, I have the ability, the capability, to love someone else, to feel for others. That makes me different and, I hope, slightly better. Even if I don’t always act right, there’s hope for me; there’s a chance that my life will straighten out and that I can put all of this behind me. Reinvent myself, you could say. That’s what I thought about as I walked away from Bobby’s funeral. That I had a chance to start afresh, and while I knew that it wasn’t much of a chance, it was one, and it was there for me.
For Dominic, not so much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
DOMINIC
In the week after my gig at Steamboat, I spent a fair amount of time wondering why Elizabeth hadn’t shot me instead of Brian, and I think it came down to one thing. Just one. I think that she knew, deep in her heart, that Bobby would have ended up behind bars for killing a cop and, on his way to prison, he’d have ruined her life and mine.
Even if she didn’t care about me anymore, which I doubted, she’s no different from me in that self-preservation is a priority, a reflex almost. Now, with Bobby gone, she was safe, and I was the one who’d made her safe. That’s why she shot Brian instead of me: as weird as it sounds, she thought I’d done the right thing.
Put slightly differently, she let me live because she truly believed that Bobby was the one who’d killed Detective Ledsome.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Pryor is the author of Hollow Man, which introduced the protagonist Dominic, and the Hugo Marston novels: The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, The Reluctant Matador, The Paris Librarian, and The Sorbonne Affair. He has also published the true-crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children.
