Double Take ft-11

by Catherine Coulter

  “He didn’t say anything at all before he left you?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Did he receive any phone calls?”

  “Yes, one, but I couldn’t hear what he said.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I know he was getting ready for his big production.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  Remarkably, she gave him a big smile. “Then I woke up to see your face. Thank you for helping me back.”

  Kathryn looked up to see Sherlock smiling down at her. She said, “Do you know, I think Fig Newtons are about the best thing in the world?”

  CHAPTER 53

  Xavier Makepeace watched Johnny Booth twitch. The man never stopped twitching; it was like there was a battery inside him you couldn’t turn off. Johnny flexed and unflexed his fingers, banged his fist yet again on the steering wheel. He hadn’t stopped twitching, cursing, or banging his fist and yakking about how they were going to get caught for sure and it was all his fault. “You screwed up, dude, you screwed everything to hell and gone. You can fly right off to Zanzibar, but I don’t even have a passport. What am I going to do? I knew I shouldn’t have listened to you, shouldn’t have listened to Zannie—she’s always saying you’re some kind of international modern i-con—whatever the hell that means. She’s probably got the hots for you.”

  For at least the third time, his voice calm and soothing, Xavier Makepeace recited the same words. He hated to repeat himself, particularly to someone he considered a moron. “How would the cops get you, Johnny? We got away clean, you told me yourself. No one saw you at the Ransom house, no one saw us driving off after you picked me up. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but that don’t matter. Thing is, like I told you, there was that old guy—”

  “You said he was an ancient old coot and the little girl with him couldn’t have been more than five. So what?”

  “He was staring real hard at me, and that little gal, she looked sharp as my pa’s stiletto. I tell you, dude, they both saw me and studied me, yeah, that’s it. Maybe the old guy got my license plate. Besides, there were lots of people out. Somebody else could have seen me, somebody I didn’t notice. My pa used to say you have to watch every bump in the road, they was always hiding close by to trip you up. Yeah, the old guy could have described me to the cops and you can bet one of the vice cops will recognize who I am. Cops ain’t so stupid as you think they are. If you wasn’t wearing the Kevlar, you’d by lying on your back not breathing. They nearly nailed you this time, didn’t they?”

  He had to shut this moron up soon or his head would explode. And maybe Johnny was right, maybe the old guy described him well enough for an I.D. Well, it didn’t matter one way or the other, did it?

  Makepeace said, with infinite patience, “But they didn’t, did they? And they won’t get you either, Johnny. Stop your worrying.” But the moron was right, they’d very nearly nailed him. Put four bullets in his Kevlar, three of the four kill shots. That made him even angrier than Johnny did.

  “Take the Pacifica exit, Johnny, I want to stop for a while downtown. There’s a nice crab restaurant there, you’ll like it.”

  “What’s with your accent, dude? You’ve changed it all of a sudden. You’re starting to sound like some weird-ass Brit. Hey, I don’t want to go to Pacifica, I don’t live anywhere near Pacifica.” Makepeace stared him down and Johnny started cursing again and banging the steering wheel, calling himself names now, but he look the exit.

  Makepeace said, “You can take a cab home, Johnny. With all the money I gave you for this failed job, you can call a limo to take you home. Take a right here. I want to go down to the beach.”

  “Beach? You nuts, dude? The beach? Listen, I want a bonus for my health scare, man, I nearly seized up with an attack. It was only a burglary, you said, practically a setup. You owe me a bonus.”

  “Turn, Johnny.”

  Johnny turned onto the narrow beach road that wound back on itself across a low sloping hill down to the wood-strewn brown sand beach. There was a small parking area off to the right, with several walking trails feeding off it. “Pull in here, Johnny. I want to commune with nature.”

  “Was that some sort of lame-ass joke? Well, I’m not laughing, am I? Forget nature. You gonna give me a bonus? You know I deserve one after what you pulled.”

  “Yes, you’re right, I can surely afford to take care of your worries. Trust me.”

  There were no other cars in the small parking lot. Johnny cut the engine and sat back, rubbed his hands over his face. “Hey, I’m sorry I got so freaked out. I wasn’t expecting the crazy trouble we ran into. I mean, there were cops all over that neighborhood. Like they were waiting for us. They were waiting for you, weren’t they? How’d they know you was coming?”

  I’d hoped they’d be there, that’s what made it interesting. He smiled.

  He rubbed his hand over his shoulder where one of the agents had shot him, nearly missed his Kevlar vest and hit his neck. That was close. He pictured a big dark guy, and a woman, red hair, lots of wild red hair. He’d find out who they were. He’d taken out the other agent, Stone, a clean shot to the heart, a clean shot to the back—unless he was wearing Kevlar as well. With that guy’s streak of luck, and that was surely all it was, Makepeace imagined that he was.

  “I didn’t know you was going to blow up that house, you never said a word about blowing up no house. Hey, just look out at the ocean. Ain’t it beautiful? Clear as a bell—I never understood why they say that. How’s a bell so clear?”

  “A church bell, Johnny.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, look at it, Johnny,” Makepeace said, and pulled out a length of silver wire.

  CHAPTER 54

  Wednesday evening

  Cheney said, “No, Julia, you’re not going anywhere, forget it. You’re only safe here at the Sherlocks’ house. No one knows where you are.”

  “Cheney, listen to me. My house is a smoldering ruin. I don’t know what if anything can be salvaged. I’ve got to deal with the insurance people, with the clean-up people, with the arson investigators from the fire department. And I don’t have any clothes to wear.” She looked down at the pair of turquoise blue sweats she was wearing, courtesy of Evelyn Sherlock. The legs ended two inches above her ankles.

  Cheney had to admit she looked faintly ridiculous.

  Ruth said, “Don’t worry, Julia. I’ll get you some clothes tomorrow. Cheney’s right. You need to stay close.”

  Savich walked into the living room, his cell in his hand. He looked at each of them, then asked Sherlock, “You remember how little Alice described a ring on the getaway driver’s marriage finger? And Tuck said she was describing a Masonic ring?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “The Pacifica police found it on the finger of a dead man who had been garroted and left in a small dark-blue Ford at a beach parking lot outside of Pacifica. The cops picked up on it and called Frank right away. The Ford was all souped up, the detective told Frank—probably the getaway car.

  “The guy,” Dix said, “who was he?” He lightly scratched the flesh around the stitches in his arm.

  “They identified him as Johnny Booth, not an upstanding citizen, as you’d expect. Two felony counts on him for armed robbery and pimping, served a total of nine years in San Quentin. He was once booked for killing a liquor store clerk, but got off. Vice thought he’d left California because of the three-strikes law.”

  Sherlock said, “Makepeace doesn’t like loose ends, does he?”

  “Maybe he’s just cheap,” Ruth said. “Didn’t want to pay the guy his fee.”

  Cheney’s cell phone rang. He nodded, and walked out of the living room. When he came back, he looked shell-shocked. He said, “Makepeace has been busier than we thought. That was Frank again. He just heard from the police in Atherton that Sol-dan is dead. He was found lying back on the silk pillows in that exotic room of his wearing his red silk robe, a deep gash in his t
hroat where he’d been garroted. Frank said he’d been smoking his hookah and reading Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. He’d been dead only about an hour, the ME said. Ancilla, his assistant, found him when she got home from an AA meeting.

  “Evidently the murderer slipped behind him, looped the wire around his neck, and that was it. Since he’d been smoking all evening, according to Ancilla, it couldn’t have been very hard to sneak up on him.

  “But once Makepeace had the wire around his neck, Soldan did fight. The ME says it looks like there’s skin under Soldan’s fingernails, probably from Makepeace.”

  Ruth said, “Makepeace has got to be a mess—bullet wounds, a scraped face from that newel post exploding, and Meissen’s fingernails—and the guy’s still going.”

  Julia said, “He’s got a powerful need.”

  Sherlock said, “I wonder why he didn’t clean Soldan’s hands once he’d killed him. He’s a professional and professionals wouldn’t leave hard evidence like that.”

  Dix raised his head. “Who cares? Makepeace certainly doesn’t. We still don’t have him and we don’t have Pallack.” He rose and walked to the front windows and said over his shoulder, “What we’ve got is nothing—no evidence, no witnesses, not a single one of Dr. Ransom’s journals that we all hoped would give us the reasons and the motives—” He faced the windows again. “It has to be Pallack, all of you know it.”

  “Yes, I agree,” Ruth said. “I wonder why he had Makepeace kill Meissen.”

  Savich said, “For some reason Meissen was a danger to him. Don’t forget, both Ransom and Meissen were his own personal mediums. He’s in the center of all of this, Dix is right about that. We’ll get there, Dix, be patient,” But Savich could tell his words were falling on deaf ears.

  “Hey,” Ruth said, “maybe it was Meissen who hired Makepeace to kill August Ransom.”

  Cheney said, “Only if he wanted his clients. Sounds nuts to me, but we’re talking woo-woo here so who knows?”

  There was a tense silence because no one knew what to do next, when suddenly Savich stood and announced he and Sherlock would be leaving for New York on the red-eye.

  They drove to SFO in under twenty minutes and made it to the gate with five minutes to spare.

  CHAPTER 55

  ATTICA, NEW YORK

  Thursday

  Big Sonny Moldavo of the New York Field Office met Savich and Sherlock at their gate when they deplaned at JFK and escorted them to the black Bell FBI helicopter waiting to take them to Attica. “Bobby’s your pilot, hell of a wild man. He was a helicopter pilot in Desert Storm, buzzed the Republican Guard whenever he got bored, but, hey, don’t worry, he’ll get you there.” When Big Sonny left them in the wild man’s hands, Bobby spit a good six feet, stretched, and gave them a lazy grin. “You guys must be real important to get such fancy treatment. Okay, Attica’s between Rochester and Buffalo—it won’t take too long. Climb aboard and buckle up.” In the next minute they’d lifted off and were soon looking down at a beautiful clear day over lower Manhattan.

  Sherlock took a drink of water, and handed the bottle to Savich. He drank deeply, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  She looked down. They’d already passed over Manhattan and the suburbs. They were flying over flatlands now, broken with pine and oak forests. Occasional small towns dotted the countryside. She pointed down to a red barn, glittering in the morning sunlight.

  Savich nodded. “This whole business—even though we know it’s Pallack, there’s no way we could talk a judge into granting us a warrant to search his penthouse or his office.”

  She drummed her fingertips on her leg. “I know, but you’ve got to remember we only arrived in San Francisco two nights ago—amazing, given all that’s happened. Why are we going to see Courtney James now, Dillon?”

  “I had MAX look him up the other morning. He was a neighbor of the Pallacks so he knew all of them, Thomas Pallack, and his parents. For years. And I realized he must know Thomas Pallack better than anyone else living. If anyone can fill in the blanks, I figure it’s James.

  “Then we hit all the excitement with Makepeace and I had to put him on my mental back burner.

  “But the thing is, even though it’s only been two days we’ve been on this, I’m worried about Dix. He’s so frustrated he looks ready to burst out of his skin. I have this hope, Sherlock,” and he raised her hand to kiss her fingers, “that since we’re stopped dead in our tracks in San Francisco that maybe, just maybe, Courtney James will have something to say that will break up the roadblock.”

  “What could he tell us? All his knowledge, his memories of the Pallacks, is thirty years old.”

  Savich sighed. “I know, I know.”

  “But you’re hopeful.”

  He kissed her, said against her mouth, “Yep, I’m hopeful. We’ll see.”

  Sherlock hoped so too, although she couldn’t imagine what Courtney James would tell them that would be of any use. She yawned. Even though both of them were good sleepers on planes, the last few days had wiped them both out. It had to come to an end soon, she thought, it simply had to. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, the sound of the helicopter blade rumbling through her head, and imagined the three of them playing on the beach in Aruba.

  An hour later Bobby set them down on the rippled asphalt helipad at Tomlinson Field, the small airport outside Attica, and waved them to a nondescript beige Ford Escort parked at the edge of the tarmac. He gave them both a sharp salute and a lazy smile, said he was glad neither of them had been big yakkers, and in the next breath added, “Hey, maybe we can have some more fun on our return trip.”

  “Can’t wait,” Savich said. “I was just thinking the ride over was smooth as my treadmill.”

  Sherlock said, “Yeah, I especially liked how my stomach heaved up to my ears when you banked halfway over to set us down.”

  Bobby smiled. “I’ll have to do something about that, won’t I? I wouldn’t want you two big shots to be bored on the way back to the big bad city.”

  The sun had disappeared behind darkening clouds thirty minutes before, and was still a no-show in western New York. The wind kicked up occasional gusts that dusted up the dirt beside the road. The trees, they saw, were greening up nicely with the spring rains. The land was flat, cows thick in pastures, and Alexander Road was light on traffic. Savich drove past the Attican Motel thinking he’d like to turn in, pull the shades down in a room, and sleep with Sherlock until Monday. Coming east on the red-eye wiped you out.

  Two guards and an administrator escorted them to the hospital, a basic three-story red brick building, like most of the other buildings in the vast correctional facility. There they met Warden Daniel Rafferty, who adjusted his thick glasses to closely check their I.D.s even though they’d already been checked twice, and shook their hands. “Courtney was having problems breathing during the night so we brought him here to check him out. He’s had some heart problems for years now, but never anything life-threatening. Still, we like to be careful. He’s on the third floor. This way.”

  Sherlock whispered behind her hand when the warden was a goodly distance ahead of them, “We’re met by the warden himself, who refers to our mass murderer as Courtney? It sounds like they’ve given him such fine care he might fund a new building if he’s ever paroled.”

  Warden Rafferty laughed, turned, and grinned at her. “The acoustics in the hospital are truly phenomenal. You’re right, of course. Courtney James is in a class by himself. Do you think he’s really a mass murderer?” The warden shrugged. “He’s here for life, so what does it matter? Fact is, I like the old guy. I’ve never been able to see him committing any random murders because some odd voice told him to do it. Come this way.”

  Savich and Sherlock followed the warden through two sets of secure doors, both manned by guards who dropped their looks of hard-eyed intimidation when Sherlock nodded and smiled at them.

  Warden Rafferty ran into a doctor coming out of Courtney James’s room,
which was private, he remarked, because none of the other prisoners wanted to crowd in on the old man’s space. “The doc here will tell you that even the meanest thugs, the most vicious psychopaths, make way for Courtney. They defer to him in the food line, walk with him nice and slow during exercise so he won’t be alone. He has the money to get them most anything they want, legally or otherwise—you know, cigarettes, candy, CDs, and the like—but he also treats them with respect. He even gives me a rather tasty fruitcake for Christmas every year made by monks somewhere in Oregon, and he has a crate of Krispy Kremes flown in for the inmates and guards.”

  Dr. Burgess, stoop-shouldered and rumpled, looked at the agents with old, tired eyes, then he turned to Warden Rafferty. “He has a fruitcake sent to me every Christmas too. Courtney’s doing fine. I took him off the oxygen. I think he overdid it with the big poker game last night and he’s just tuckered out.” Sherlock raised an eyebrow.

  Warden Rafferty laughed. “They all have a deck of cards. They’ve developed a sophisticated code to tap against the walls of their cells to communicate—a call, raise, a fold. Evidently, Black Tooth Moses was winning big, especially from Courtney, and didn’t want to stop. Since Courtney wouldn’t ever want to disappoint him, he kept going until he collapsed. Scared the crap out of all the inmates, Black Moses the most. And the guards, needless to say.” His mouth kicked up a bit. “Yep, they like the old guy and those Krispy Kremes, glazed, still warm to the touch and nearly as fresh.”

  They walked into the small white-walled room with its three hospital beds, two of them empty. There was one utilitarian chair in the corner and a single window that looked out onto one of the yards. They followed Warden Rafferty to the bedside.

  They’d seen photos of Courtney James from the time of his arrest in 1977 to when he was pronounced guilty by the jury in 1979. But nearly thirty years had passed. None of the photos resembled the old man they saw now.

  “Courtney?”

  Vivid blue eyes stared first at the warden, then took in Sherlock and Savich. He grinned. “What’s this? You bring me a pretty girl? My, would you look at those beautiful blue eyes, sort of like mine. Hmm, could I be her granddaddy, you think?”