“I don’t know why you think I’m the man who did those awful things, but I’m not. I don’t know how I can possibly prove it to you. It’s the truth.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Woody spotted the gun near the hand of the dead cop. He moved his arm slowly, pushing his hand toward the gun. One finger, two touched the cold, textured grip. He tugged the gun into his grasp.
Ackerman saw him. “Look out!”
Woody brought his arm up, aimed at Ramsey—
He heard the blast of his own revolver and felt the bullet punch through his chest. The girl—the fucking girl had shot him. She stood above him, aiming his own gun at him. He could tell from her eyes—empty, like those of the more hardened inmates at Huntington—that she would not hesitate to shoot him again.
He dropped the cop’s gun. Ackerman darted forward, grabbed it off the ground. At the same time, the look in the girl’s eyes—the jailhouse look—drowned in a well of tears.
“It’s okay, Kristen,” the lawyer said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Shoot him, you fucking spineless bitch. Shoot them both!
She handed Ackerman the revolver without a word. Then she sank to her knees, crying. Ackerman crouched beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.
Ramsey approached, shoes crunching through ice. Woody stared up at him and coughed.
Blood splashed the snow, steamed there. Ramsey leaned forward and stared at the dark patch. His expression was maddeningly blank, unreadable.
“What are you— What are you staring at, you son of a—” Woody coughed again. More blood blasted past his teeth into the snow. The black pool actually hissed as it melted the snow beneath it.
Then he understood. She’d punctured his lung. The goddamn weepy bitch had shot him in his chest and punctured one of his fucking lungs.
Ramsey was staring at a dead man.
67
Jessie pulled a black suit from her closet and laid it across her bed. Her doctor had urged her to remain at home for a few weeks, to fully recover from the fire and the wounds in her calf, but Dr. Friedman would not be the first doctor whose advice she had chosen to disregard. She shook two Tylenol capsules from the container and downed them with a glass of water on her dresser, then began the process of redressing her wounds.
She started with her left arm, peeling the bandages off with a wince. Most of the blisters had opened, but her skin was still red and swollen. Second-degree burns, according to Dr. Friedman. She was lucky. She cleaned the area of the burn, then applied the antibiotic ointment he had prescribed. If Ramsey had not come when he had, she might have needed skin grafts. Or a tombstone.
Next she tended to the gashes in her leg. The skin was purple and swollen around the stitches. Every time she looked at it, she was reminded of Kristen Dillard’s stab wounds. She supposed that was appropriate—as it turned out, none of them had escaped the Dillard attack unharmed.
The thought made her hurry. She patted a fresh bandage over the stitches. Her eyes glanced at the digital clock next to her bed. She did not want to rush, but the minutes were speeding by. Elliot’s funeral would begin at 3:00. She was supposed to pick up Leary in twenty minutes.
One of her fingernails caught the ridge of a broken blister and she cried out. God, she was a mess.
But she was not going to miss the funeral.
Leary was ready and, thankfully, not in any more mood to talk than she was. They made it to the service just in time, even with Leary fumbling with a crutch.
She had to square her shoulders and force herself to enter the funeral home. Funerals had always been difficult for her. Leary saw her hesitate and gently took her hand—careful not to squeeze the red skin—and walked her inside.
Elliot had drawn a sizable crowd. His funeral would lack the grandeur of Jameson’s and Scerbak’s—a prosecutor killed in the line of duty did not receive the same honors as a cop; no bagpipes, no twenty-one gun salute, no folded American flag—but the assembled mourners included several faces Elliot would likely have been proud to see.
Leary nudged her. “Look out.”
For a second she failed to recognize the man striding toward them. Without his black robe and frowning countenance, he looked like a different person. But it was Judge Martin Spatt, dressed in a plain black suit, a sad smile on his craggy face.
“I heard about the explosion. Are you two recovering well?”
Jessie shook his hand carefully. “My doctor says I should heal in another week or so, no permanent scarring.”
Spatt nodded. “Good. Detective Leary.” He shook Leary’s hand just as carefully. “Nice to see you out and about. Your leg is mending, I see.”
Leary nodded. “How’s the courtroom treating you?”
Spatt’s brow furrowed. “Let’s not speak of unpleasant things. We’re here to remember Elliot Williams. You know,” he leaned toward them, conspiratorially, “usually when a lawyer kicks off, I consider it one less cockroach in my kitchen. But Elliot’s death saddens me. He had potential to be one of the good ones. And they are few, believe me.”
Jessie suppressed the temptation to ask where on this scale he ranked her.
“I heard through the judicial grapevine that our friends Jack Ackerman and Gil Goldhammer are knee deep in ethical violations,” Spatt continued, “and may face criminal charges. And they had such promising careers. Such a shame.”
Jessie sensed a distinct absence of sympathy in the man’s voice.
“You taking some time off, Detective?” Spatt said.
“A month, Your Honor.”
“Good. Fewer arrests, fewer trials. We can all breathe easier. Well, I better move along. I’m expected to mingle, you know.” He gave Jessie a wink. “See you in court, counselor.”
As soon as Spatt’s back disappeared into the crowd, Leary turned to Jessie and laughed. She laughed, too, and leaned against him.
That’s when his phone began to vibrate.
They walked outside together. A cold wind whipped Jessie’s hair, which had been unruly since the fire. Leary leaned on his crutch, put his phone to one ear and covered his other ear with his hand. “Mark Leary,” he said. Jessie saw his eyes widen. “What?” he said. “When?” He listened for a moment. The seconds seemed to spin out in cruel slow motion as she waited to hear what had turned his face ashy pale. Finally, the call ended and he put away his phone.
She raised her eyebrows.
“That was the Camden County Police Department, in New Jersey. They claim they’ve arrested the Family Man. The real one this time.”
68
At a police station in Camden, New Jersey, a Camden homicide detective named John Costa led Leary to the evidence room. The man was a bear, at least six feet, six inches tall, but he seemed mellow and eager to help. More importantly, he was kind enough not to look impatient as Leary limped his slow way forward on his crutch, or to make any jokes about Camden succeeding where Philly had failed. At the desk, Leary scrawled his name, the date, and the time into the evidence log.
“What are you looking for, exactly?” Costa said. Leary did not answer his question. The truth was, he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. Wouldn’t know even if he saw it.
The evidence clerk placed the briefcase on the counter in front of them.
“Oh, we opened that already,” Costa said.
“I see that.”
The broken locks reflected the overhead light in weird patterns where the metal twisted away from the side of the briefcase.
“We took photographs before we broke the locks,” Costa said. “You can look at those if you want.”
Leary shook his head. He pulled a pair of latex gloves over his hands and popped the case open.
Leary removed two thick notebooks from the case. He opened the first, flipped through the pages. Bob Dillard’s neat handwriting covered every one. Here and there, a computer printout had been pasted into the book—a graph, a spreadsheet. Leary did not bother trying to mak
e sense of it. He placed the notebooks to one side.
Under the notebooks was a collection of glass tubes. Fluid swished inside them. Leary held one close to his face and read the label wrapped around its neck. Dillard must have used some sort of code—the sequence of letters and numbers seemed arbitrary.
The briefcase also contained a rubber-banded stack of Petri dishes. Leary removed the rubber band and examined each dish. Again, the labels told him nothing.
“You didn’t send these to a lab for analysis?” Leary said.
“Why bother?” Costa said. “They’re not relevant to the murders.”
“They may be relevant to a case I was working in Philly.”
“Yeah?” Costa looked interested. “We can release the briefcase into your custody. I’ll get someone started on the paperwork.”
“Thanks.” Leary closed the briefcase, snapped the gloves off of his hands. He would learn more about the contents of Bob Dillard’s briefcase after the lab in Philly analyzed them.
Maybe they revealed a breakthrough treatment for ALS.
Maybe they revealed dick squat.
For one person, the answer no longer mattered. Early that morning, in the bedroom of his home in Chestnut Hill, Michael Rushford had quietly passed away.
“Anything else I can help you with?” Costa said.
Leary nodded. “There is one other thing.”
69
Jessie and Leary stood to either side of Kristen Dillard. They had agreed to remain quiet, give her time. She stared through the one-way glass into an interrogation room where a man named Todd Wilson sat in a battered metal chair. He resembled Frank Ramsey in general shape only—both were big, broad-shouldered men, with square jaws and black hair—but the resemblance ended there.
“That’s not him,” Kristen said.
Jessie’s eyes shifted focus from Wilson to Kristen’s reflection in the glass. “He was caught in the act, Kristen,” she said. “The police pulled him off of a woman named Rebecca Purcell. He had a butcher knife in his hand.”
“He was wearing a ski mask,” Leary said. “Gloves, a watch like the one you described.”
“When they searched his house, they found your father’s briefcase, among other souvenirs.”
Kristen shook her head. Tears spilled from her eyes and trailed down her cheeks. “That’s not him. Ramsey set him up somehow.”
Leary said, “One of the souvenirs found in his house was an antique compact mirror belonging to a woman named Irene Barker. She and her family were murdered in their home during Ramsey’s second trial, while he was in custody. Until now, the police assumed it was the work of a copycat.”
“I don’t care. That’s not him.”
Jessie tried to take her hand, but she yanked it away. She turned from the window, stalked out of the observation room and into the gloomy hallway. Leary sighed, looked at Jessie with a defeated expression.
She said, “I thought this would ... help her.”
“I know. Come on. Let’s take her back to the institution.”
They found her on a bench in the hallway. She was bent over, her head in her hands. Watching her body shudder as she sobbed opened a pit in Jessie’s stomach. She went to the bench, sat down beside her. “I’m sorry, Kristen. We shouldn’t have brought you here.”
“I’ll give you some space,” Leary said. “Need to use the bathroom anyway.” Before she could stop him, he crutched his way down the hallway.
“Kristen?” Jessie found a clean tissue in her bag and tried to give it to her, but the girl would not take it.
“Come on, Wilson. Move it.”
Her back stiffened. Two officers had taken Wilson from the interrogation room and were leading him down the hallway. In this direction. She looked at Kristen, looked down the hall to the cops.
There was no time to stop them. They marched Wilson right past the bench on which they sat. Kristen looked up as the man trundled by.
“That smell....”
Jessie looked at her, concerned. Wilson was past them now. The officers pushed him through a door at the end of the hall, and he was gone.
Kristen continued to sniff the air. “That ... oh God. That smell.”
Fresh tears burst from her eyes.
Jessie sniffed the air. A faint trace of the man’s odor lingered. She remembered, suddenly, her meeting with Monica Chan at NYU. Kate Moscow’s former graduate student. The one conducting research on the relationship between scent and memory.
Did you know that odors are the strongest memory triggers experienced by humans?
“Oh God.” Kristen repeated the phrase as she pressed her hands against her face. “Oh God. Oh God.”
Jessie hesitated only for a moment, then pulled the girl to her. Kristen pushed her face into Jessie’s shoulder. Warm tears dampened Jessie’s blouse as the girl shuddered in her arms. Her keening sobs echoed down the hallway. Jessie held her shaking body and rubbed her back, the motion reminding her of the way her own mother used to soothe her, so many years ago. Her own tears filled her eyes, blurring the hallway.
“It’s okay,” Jessie said. “It’s over now. It’s finally over.”
THE END
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An unreliable witness...
Prosecutor Jessie Black has an airtight case against Tyrone Nash, a gang thug who shot a man behind a bar in West Philly. But what should be an easy trial turns complicated when Nash somehow intimidates her eyewitness, and he recants his testimony on the eve of the trial. Now Jessie's only move to stop the killer from walking is to call a witness she had hoped to avoid—Reggie Tuck, a smooth-talking jailhouse snitch who claims Nash confessed to him during a short time they shared a cell. Worse, there are other people with an interest in the trial—people intent on silencing Reggie's big mouth, permanently.
A courthouse under siege...
Soon Jessie and Reggie find themselves trapped in a courthouse taken hostage by armed assailants. She must find a way to keep both Reggie and herself alive long enough to learn who they are, and how to stop them. But is Reggie Tuck's life worth protecting at the risk of her own?
Informant is the second book in a series of legal thrillers featuring Philadelphia assistant district attorney Jessie Black. If you enjoy complex and suspenseful stories, characters who jump off the page, and enough twists and turns to give you whiplash, you'll love this book.
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About the Author
Larry A. Winters’s stories feature a rogue’s gallery of brilliant lawyers, avenging porn stars, determined cops, undercover FBI agents, and vicious bad guys of all sorts. When not writing, he can be found living a life of excitement. Not really, but he does know a good time when he sees one: reading a book by the fireplace on a cold evening, catching a rare movie night with his wife (when a friend or family member can be coerced into babysitting duty), smart TV dramas (and dumb TV comedies), vacations (those that involve reading on the beach, a lot of eating, and not a lot else), cardio on an elliptical trainer (generally beginning upon his return from said vacations, and quickly taper
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