by Karen Rose
‘I agree,’ Joseph said. ‘She’s—’
‘Excuse me!’ They turned to see Henderson on her feet, as close to the glass as her chain would allow, the smug smile still on her face. ‘If I get snuffed while in holding, it was Robinette. And as for what he has planned? Let’s just say that the bodies you have piling up in your morgue will be like drops in the ocean. That is all.’ With a little wave, she went back to her chair.
Stevie shook her head. ‘She’s something, all right. She’s afraid to leave with the attorney. I’m of half a mind to make her. Only half,’ she rushed to add when Grayson opened his mouth to protest. ‘Can we get a search warrant for Robinette’s house and business? Maybe we can find out what she’s talking about.’
‘On Henderson’s say so?’ Grayson shook his head. ‘No. We don’t have anything of Robinette’s to compare with the hair and blood we found. He was never arrested for the murder of his wife and his prints and DNA are no longer in the military’s database, either. He and Henderson submitted “proper requests through channels” to have their personal data deleted.’
‘It was their right,’ Joseph said. ‘That, in and of itself, isn’t damning.’
‘But it is damn convenient for them,’ Hyatt grumbled.
‘True,’ Joseph allowed. ‘Simple association with Henderson isn’t enough for a warrant either. It’s her word against his. All we know is that they knew each other in the past. Let’s come back to Robinette later and talk about the third shooter now, the one who probably set Henderson up before fleeing the country.’ He turned to Stevie, amused censure on his face. ‘You have to stop calling the guy “Cocksucker”. I nearly swallowed my tongue.’
But Stevie barely heard him. She was still back on Grayson’s comment, a scene from eight years ago playing in her head with startling clarity. ‘We have Robinette’s DNA.’
‘Where?’ Grayson demanded.
‘In the evidence room.’ She turned to Hyatt. ‘Remember when I was trying to get his case reopened? Silas had closed it, declaring Levi Robinette to have been his stepmother’s killer.’
‘You never believed the boy did it,’ Hyatt murmured.
‘No, I didn’t, but the evidence said otherwise. Robinette must have planted the murder weapon in Levi’s room before leading us there to find it. Todd had a bad smoking habit then, two packs a day. He was always careful not to leave any butts behind or leftover cups of coffee for that matter, but I kept following him until I caught him at a careless moment. One of his employees grabbed him when he stepped outside to smoke – there was a fire in the warehouse.’
‘Lucky,’ Grayson said, a gleam in his eye.
Stevie snorted. ‘Lucky nothing. That employee hated Robinette’s guts. His name was Frank Locke and he worked in the lab. He directly reported to the head chemist who was killed along with Robinette’s wife, Julie. Locke cared for both of them, was grieving them. And he did not believe they’d been having an affair – like whoever killed them wanted it to appear.’
‘He helped you obtain evidence,’ Clay said.
‘He did. I was standing outside, waiting for Robinette to come out. I’d stopped going into the plant to talk to him because he was always “unavailable”.’
Clay’s lips turned up. ‘So you stalked him.’
‘Basically. Anyway, Todd lights up. I’m hiding in the shadows, praying he gets careless when Locke runs up, grabs Robinette’s arm. They have a quick conversation I can’t hear, then Robinette yells, “What the fuck have you done?” He throws the cigarette to the ground, puts it out with his shoe, and starts running. Then, when they get to the door, Locke looks right at me. Gives me this look like, “Make this count.” So I bagged the butt, and hightailed it out of there.’
‘So the lab ran it?’ Grayson asked, all but rubbing his hands together with glee.
‘No. Turnarounds were longer then, and he was way back in the queue because it wasn’t a high priority case. Two days later Todd comes in with his attorney, telling us the sad story about Levi. We found the bat that was used to kill Robinette’s wife and her alleged “lover” in Levi’s closet, we confront him, he starts shooting. And then . . .’ She faltered. ‘Then I killed him.’
Clay rubbed her back. ‘He gave you no choice.’
‘Levi was set up. I bought into it. I let Robinette manipulate me, even though I knew in my gut, in my heart, that he’d done it. Now that boy is dead and nothing will change that.’
‘That made you angry,’ Clay said quietly.
‘It sure as hell did.’ Stevie’s voice wobbled and she didn’t care. ‘That’s why I kept pushing to reopen the case. Robinette got away with it. That he’s crawled out from under his rock now, that he’s started this vendetta against me for killing Levi? It’s outrageous. The man is insane.’
‘Nobody’s arguing with you,’ Clay said. ‘The good thing is that the cigarette butt you bagged should still be testable, right? We just have to locate it and resubmit it.’
‘I’ll go down to the evidence room myself,’ Hyatt said. ‘I’ll walk it to the lab, make sure they know it’s a priority. We’ll get him this time, Stevie,’ he promised on his way out the door.
Stevie nodded, too raw to say another word. She hadn’t thought about this case in eight years, pushing it into the recesses of her mind along with all the pain of losing Paul. And Paulie.
‘I know how hard all this must be for you,’ Joseph told her, ‘but I need to circle back to the third shooter. I think it makes sense to assume he served with Robinette and Henderson. I think it’s less likely he’s traveling under his own passport, but we’ll check it out.’
‘Unfortunately he has the build of half the men in the military,’ Clay said. ‘Matching a body type won’t narrow it down. We can get an eye color, but his goggles distorted his features.’
Stevie returned to the glass, leaning against her cane, watching as Henderson was escorted out of the interview room. The woman turned her gaze to the glass as she walked by, as if knowing people were watching. The amused confidence she exuded pissed Stevie off, cutting through the numbness into which she’d briefly retreated.
Her brain, beginning to function again, grabbed another detail that leaped from the mist of her memory and jumped onto center stage. ‘Why did Robinette drive to Virginia?’
‘Excuse me?’ Joseph asked with a frown.
‘You told us that he crossed the Chesapeake Bay at the northern end, driving from Baltimore to Annapolis and across the Bay Bridge to get to Wight’s Landing and Tanner’s beach house. That’s on the Maryland end of the Eastern Shore.’
‘I get the geography, Stevie,’ Joseph said dryly. ‘Where are you going with this?’
‘I don’t know. Yet. But we do know that, after the shooting at the dock, Robinette escaped by driving south, four hours out of his way to the Virginia end of the Eastern Shore. Then he came back across the Bay through the Bay Bridge Tunnel, which would have put him down by Newport News. That meant he had to drive another four hours back up to Baltimore. He went eight hours out of his way. Why?’
‘He was afraid he’d be caught going back over the Bay Bridge,’ Joseph said with a shrug. ‘He barely got away from Tanner’s property before Sheriff Moore’s deputy arrived at the scene, followed closely by Deacon Novak. He didn’t want to risk it. That makes sense to me.’
‘What about it doesn’t make sense to you, Stevie?’ Grayson asked.
Frowning, Stevie walked to the whiteboard on the observation room wall and picked up a red marker, tapping it against her chin. And then she knew what bothered her.
Quickly she sketched a map of the area. ‘You’ve got the Delmarva Peninsula here. It’s separated from Baltimore and Annapolis on the mainland by the Chesapeake Bay, crossable by the Bay Bridge at the top. Delaware and Philly are north, then you’ve got all these little roads going south, cutting through the Maryland part . . .’ she squiggled some lines ‘. . . ending up at the tip of the Virginia part and then back to the mainland via th
e Bay Bridge Tunnel.’
‘Thus the Del-Mar-Va name,’ Joseph said, shaking his head. ‘What gives, Stevie?’
‘Oh, I see,’ Clay murmured, giving Stevie a nod of approval. ‘Robinette didn’t need to go eight hours out of his way to run from the law yesterday morning.’
‘Exactly,’ Stevie said. ‘He could have gone east across the peninsula, toward the ocean, then north to Delaware. If he took side roads, he could have bypassed the Delaware Turnpike, the Bay Bridge, and the Bay Bridge Tunnel. And all of their toll cameras. He would have been back in Baltimore by breakfast.’
‘Instead he drives eight hours and risks exposure on another toll camera,’ Joseph said. ‘Okay, I’m with you now. Why would he do that?’
Stevie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have to assume he had some reason to go to Virginia. Now, we do know the first intruder into Clay’s house yesterday was shocked to see that Robinette had murdered those two cops. He hightailed it out of there, remember?’
‘And then left the country a few hours later,’ Grayson said. ‘Most of the flights or combinations of flights that would have put him over the Pacific when he called Henderson would have left the East Coast around six P.M. Sunday evening.’
Stevie nodded. ‘We also know that Robinette made a lot of phone calls to his phone number on Sunday morning before he arrived at Clay’s and killed the cops.’
‘Like Robinette was getting twitchy about something, maybe,’ Clay said. ‘It sounded like Henderson believed Robinette was out to kill her. Maybe he was twitchy about Intruder One, too. Not crazy about that moniker, though. Just doesn’t have the same ring as Cocksucker.’
Joseph’s lips twitched, then he sobered. ‘That man probably killed Culp and the clerk. Killing Scott Culp, I get. Culp leaked the whereabouts of the safe house to Robinette and once it became clear Hyatt had rigged it to flush the leak out, Culp became a loose end. However, the clerk’s still a mystery.’
Stevie sat down, her leg having begun to ache. ‘Why would Robinette try to kill Henderson? Just because she missed?’
‘Maybe he was afraid she’d get caught,’ Clay said. ‘And then do what she just did – offer to give him up in return for a deal. She became a loose end, like Scott Culp. He had police informants. If he found out I’d shot her, he might have been afraid she’d left blood evidence behind that could ID her. Again, giving her the opportunity to betray him.’
Another detail jumped to the middle of her brain. ‘Joseph, you showed Henderson a photo of her apartment, all burned up. Can I see it?’
‘She never blinked when I showed it to her,’ Joseph said, handing Stevie the picture. ‘She already knew he’d burned down her place.’
‘When did this happen?’ she asked.
‘Saturday night, about two hours after she shot at you.’
Stevie nodded. ‘That makes sense. She probably tried to go home Saturday night. If I’d been shot doing a drive-by shooting, I’d try to crawl home, patch myself up. But she couldn’t go home because Robinette already burned it down.’
‘No,’ Joseph said, ‘he had to have had someone do it for him. He was accepting a Humanitarian of the Year award from a civic group when the fire occurred.’
‘May have been Intruder One that did the fire,’ Grayson said. ‘He took care of killing Culp. Sounds like he’s Robinette’s muscle.’
‘What if Henderson went to that hotel, the one where the clerk was found dead?’ Stevie pointed to the photo of the burned-out apartment. ‘She couldn’t go home because it was burned up. She had to go somewhere to get patched up.’
‘And if Intruder One had been sent to follow her . . .’ Clay shrugged. ‘It makes sense.’
She rubbed the back of her neck, then relaxed when Clay took up the task for her. The man had amazing hands. ‘Assuming all that, then at some point Henderson left the Key Hotel and ended up at the free clinic,’ she said, ‘because she stole the doctor’s truck. Between leaving the free clinic and murdering Radcliffe’s cameraman, she gets a call from Intruder One, from somewhere over the Pacific. Fast forward a few hours and she breaks into Clay’s and my room at the Peabody Hotel, armed with a weapon that she is later very surprised to learn had been used in two murders. She felt betrayed. Betrayed enough to give Intruder One up, too.’
‘They were friends,’ Clay said. ‘He calls her, knows she’s in trouble, tells her where to find some weapons. She doesn’t expect him to set her up for the two murders. But why would he do it? He’s on his way to Asia. Why would he call her from the air to give her weapons?’
Clay’s hands had moved from her neck to her shoulders and Stevie had to bite back a moan. ‘She thought Robinette was out to kill her. Maybe Intruder One expected her to go after Robinette and not come after us in the hotel room.’
Joseph shook his head. ‘All of that might be true, but none of it addresses why Robinette went to Virginia, if he did, indeed, go there on purpose.’
Stevie looked at her crudely drawn map again. ‘We know the time at which he crossed the Bay Bridge, here,’ she pointed, ‘from the toll booth records. And we know when he left Tanner’s property – seconds after he finished shooting at the dock. And when he hit the Bay Bridge Tunnel, down here, again, from the toll records. So we can track his path that far. Can you have your agents check for any unusual occurrences along his path during this time period?’
‘The timeline developed by my aide,’ Joseph said, ‘shows that Robinette couldn’t have started for Wight’s Landing until late Sunday night. A news article said that he hosted a dinner party that night at his home at which he agreed to consider a run for public office.’
Stevie’s mouth fell open. ‘You have got to be kidding! That makes me sick.’
‘Agreed,’ Joseph said, ‘but that he’s doing so many events and appearances gives us the ability to track his past movements. My team will know what time to begin and end their search, plus the points in between.’
Clay’s hands stilled on Stevie’s shoulders. ‘You might have just narrowed down the list of soldiers who served with Robinette. We already knew we could search based on his eye color from the security video from my house, shoe size, too. But now we can also filter our search by anyone who has a Virginia address, now or in the past.’
‘Or family in that area,’ Stevie added, grimly following the direction his mind had taken. ‘Robinette was willing to kill Cordelia to draw me out. He was willing to set up his own son for a murder he committed. Maybe he figured he could flush Intruder One out the same way.’ She stood up, having made a decision in that moment. ‘Are we done for now?’
‘You are,’ Joseph said. ‘I have a ton of work to do. Why?’
‘Because my child needs me, and I need her. I’m taking a break for a few hours to spend time with Cordelia.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Baltimore, Maryland, Tuesday, March 18, 1.45 A.M.
I’m dead, Robinette thought, curling into as tight a ball as he could. He knew he wasn’t really dead, but at this point he sure wanted to be.
Fletch poisoned me. There was no other explanation. This was no mild sedative wearing off. And then Fletch left and took the formula. I’m ruined. There’s nothing left.
‘Todd?’ Lisa pushed his office door open because Fletch had left it unlocked. ‘Are you all right?’ she demanded. Then, abruptly, concern became contempt. ‘You’re drunk.’
‘No. Not drunk.’
‘Then what’s this?’ From the corner of his eye he could see she held an empty liquor bottle.
‘Not mine.’ Fletch had left it. To get me in trouble with Lisa. It was a final slap in the face.
‘Don’t lie to me, Todd. What scandal’s about to hit the paper and ruin your political career before you even have one? I barely fixed that last bar fight. Goddammit, I’m sick of you.’
She hadn’t fixed anything. Brenda Lee had made that lawsuit go away. ‘Same goes.’
She grabbed his injured arm and yanked, trying to pull him to feet
. He groaned and vomited. All over her new Manolos. So there was some justice in the world.
‘You did that on purpose,’ she hissed. ‘If you’re so sick of me, why did you call me?’
‘No one left,’ he said, his mind roiling. On some level he knew he should stop talking but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘All gone except for Brenda Lee. She can’t carry me.’
There was a long moment of silence. ‘I hate you,’ Lisa said, her voice breaking.
He’d made her cry. Good. He’d do worse when he woke up. If he lived.
‘Just get me home.’ The cavalry would be there soon enough. He’d called Brenda Lee before he’d called Lisa. She’d meet him at his house and would take him someplace he could sleep this off in safety. Brenda Lee was the last one he trusted.
Hunt Valley, Maryland, Tuesday, March 18, 11.45 A.M.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad?’ Stevie asked as she hung up her cell phone and reached across the console to hold his hand. They’d been halfway to Daphne’s farm when the call had come in from Lieutenant Hyatt. From the sound of the call it was mostly bad news.
Although it was hard to be truly upset at the moment. Stevie sat next to him, inviting his touch. They were finally on their path together when he’d almost given up hope.
‘Good news first,’ he murmured.
‘Joseph’s agents connected Robinette’s travel path through Virginia to his past. A Newport News home burned down mid-morning on Monday. It belonged to a Michael and Winnifred Westmoreland. They weren’t home, but had they been, firefighters were doubtful they would have made it out alive. Mrs Westmoreland is disabled and uses a wheelchair.’
‘Cold. But not a surprise. What’s the connection?’
‘Michael Westmoreland, Jr. He wasn’t an MP with Robinette, but was stationed in the same camp at the same time. He’s a computer guru, apparently, and the head of security at Filbert Pharmaceutical Lab. His eye color matches Intruder One’s. So now he has a name.’
