The Strategist

by John Hardy Bell

  Camille heard the faint scream of a siren somewhere in the distance. Then a second. But the sound was of no comfort to her. It didn’t matter if they arrived in five minutes or five seconds. The resolution to this situation was completely out of their hands.

  It was squarely in hers.

  Using every ounce of physical strength she had left, Camille lifted herself off the ground until her eyes were level with the car window. It was then that she saw him, standing directly in front of the window with his back to her. His arms were down at his sides and his broad shoulders appeared slumped. It was an unnerving sight, and for a moment, Camille was unsure of how to react. She slowly turned on her heels until her body was square to the window, then she pointed the gun through it, taking dead aim at his back. Presuming he was carrying a gun, she thought about taking a shoulder shot, disabling him enough so that he would drop it. But she couldn’t see which hand he held the gun in. Then she thought about aiming higher, creating a disability that was much more permanent. But shooting someone in the back of the head would never pass the self-defense test, no matter how loosely the term was defined.

  Finally she stood completely upright, extended the gun as far in front of her as she could, and yelled. “Drop the gun and raise your hands where I can see them!”

  From her new vantage point she could only see the man from the shoulders up. But she saw enough to know that he hadn’t budged an inch.

  “I said put your hands where I can see them!” Camille staggered along the edge of the car until she could see his profile. When he turned his head to look at her, she gasped.

  The young, red-faced officer she first saw in front of Julia’s house looked both amused and disgusted as he shook his head at her. But it was Camille who felt disgusted when she was hit with the sudden realization that she had met the officer a second time – with Elliott Richmond only a few hours ago.

  “Let me guess,” he said with a pained half-smile. “You were hiding in the car.”

  Camille kept her gun trained on him as she inched closer. She remembered he had called himself Solomon Gates. But Camille now knew that name was about as genuine as her use of Naomi Stephens had been. As she made her way around the car, she could see a gun dangling in his left hand. She extended hers further. “I said drop it, now!”

  “You do a great impersonation of a cop. Has anybody ever told you that?”

  The sirens were getting closer.

  “So do you. Now shut up and drop the gun!”

  He moved for the first time, subtly shifting his weight to his left side. His shoulder flinched slightly, and Camille knew instinctively that he was preparing to raise it. She fired her gun before he could. The shot landed square in the middle of his shoulder blade, the damage to his auxiliary nerve causing him to instantly drop the gun. He stumbled backward onto the hood of Sullivan’s car, cradling the wound. Camille knew the pain of getting shot in the shoulder first hand. The payback felt good.

  She ran toward him as quickly as her heavy legs would take her. When she was mere inches away, she aimed her gun directly at his head, holding it so close that the end of the barrel nearly touched him.

  “You should have listened when I told you to drop it,” she said, suddenly feeling every bit in control of the situation.

  “I suppose I should have,” he answered in between labored breaths. Blood was beginning to seep through the fingers that he held up to the wound, and the skin on his muscular face was already growing pale. “You’ve got me Agent Grisham. Dead to rights.” He winced as he applied more pressure to his shoulder. “Is this the part of the interrogation where I spill my guts? Confess all the sordid little details?”

  He was smug in spite of the situation and it infuriated her. Camille took another step toward him. Even though the barrel of her gun was now pressed firmly against his sweaty temple, he didn’t give an inch of ground. “You can start by telling me your real name. I know it’s not Solomon Gates, and Officer Davies doesn’t ring particularly true either.”

  He smiled thinly. “Starting with the basic stuff. I like that. The only problem is those sirens approaching don’t give either of us much time. You can ask fifty questions until they slap the handcuffs on you, or you can end this the right way.”

  “What the hell do you mean, slap the cuffs on me?”

  “Two dead detectives. You holding a gun up to a police officer’s head. You’ll be lucky if they don’t shoot you on sight.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, asshole. And you’re not a real police officer. If they didn’t realize that before, they certainly will now.” Camille pressed the gun harder into the side of his head.

  “Maybe. But maybe not. Why wait for them to arrive to find out? If the roles were reversed, I’d certainly kill you.”

  “Isn’t that what Elliott Richmond sent here to do in the first place?”

  His smile broadened. “A gentleman never tells.”

  “Answer the question!”

  “Were you always this aggressive an interrogator, Camille? I bet you were really tough, especially with that serial killer of yours. How long did it take to get a confession out of him? If you employed the gun-up-to-the-temple technique, I imagine it didn’t take long at all.”

  Camille thought about Sykes and her three separate interrogations of him. He toyed with her every step of the way, offering only the tiniest kernel of information before later disavowing his testimony altogether. This went on for each emotionally draining four-hour session, until the third one, when he recounted their meeting in Alexandria, then followed that up by listing the names of four women and two teenage boys he killed in the interim. That was how the interrogation began. It was also the last thing Camille heard before she ran out of the room in tears, and ran away from the FBI in shame.

  Right now another killer was trying to toy with her in the exact same way. But if this was an interrogation, it was certainly not going to end the way the last one did.

  Without giving a second thought, Camille took the gun away from his temple and put it under his chin, pushing up until his head went backwards. “Right now I don’t care about Richmond, I don’t care about the disk, I don’t care about you trying to kill me. I only want to know one thing. Were you the one who killed Julia?”

  He gagged as Camille pressed the barrel deep into the soft flesh of his chin. She eased up enough to allow him to speak.

  “We don’t have time for this. My friends are almost here.”

  Camille could see the approaching lights out of the corner of her eye. She was distracted for no more than a millisecond, but that was all the time he needed. She felt the blow to her chest before she saw it coming. It wasn’t hard, just enough to send her reeling backward a few steps. But it gave him the leverage he needed to grab her arm with one hand and bend her wrist back with the other, causing her to drop the gun. Even after being disabled by a gunshot, his strength was overwhelming. She bellowed in pain as he pressed down on her wound then kicked her in the ribs. This blow sent her careening onto the pavement, landing on her wounded arm. She let out another wail of pain. Then through blurry eyes, she saw him bend down to pick up his gun.

  Soon he was standing over her, staring straight into her eyes. His gun hung low on his side. Pain shot from Camille’s arm to the rest of her body like streaks of lightning and she could barely keep her eyes open. But she kept focused on him. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to die a coward. She bit down hard on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering and lifted her head off the asphalt. She didn’t flinch, even as he lifted his gun and pointed it at her face.

  The sirens that were once barely a whisper in the distance had now become deafeningly loud. The man, whose real identity she would probably never know, looked at the approaching police cars, then looked back down at her. For the first time she saw something in his face that resembled fear. “You want to know if I killed your friend?” he asked in an almost solemn voice as his hand tightened around the gun. “Why don’t you ask
her yourself.”

  Camille had just begun to close her eyes in anticipation of the impact when she heard a battered female voice shout: “Put it down now!”

  Before Camille could open her eyes, she heard a gunshot.

  When she finally summoned the courage to look up, she saw the officer writhing on the ground. He was cradling his hand underneath his chest. The gun he had tried to kill her with rested a few feet away from him.

  Powered by a sudden adrenaline surge, Camille jumped to her feet. Instead of picking up the gun, she kicked it as far as she could. It came to a stop underneath the wheel of a police cruiser. There were at least ten of them, and double the number of uniforms, all of them looking at her with their guns drawn. Camille instinctively put her good arm up. She couldn’t lift the second one at all.

  “Are you all right, Chloe?” one of the patrol officers said. It wasn’t until then that Camille realized the officers weren’t actually looking at her.

  When she turned around she saw Detective Sullivan on one knee, a few feet from the man who had shot her. Her blouse was covered in blood and her once pretty face looked gaunt. The gun she had just fired was still raised, as if she feared she would have to use it again.

  Within seconds the officers swarmed in, one group rushing to Detective Sullivan’s aid, the other descending on the man who murdered Camille’s best friend. He hadn’t admitted to it, but Camille knew; just like she knew who had hired him to do it.

  This morning, those officers were confident that he was one of their own. They probably told jokes over coffee and bagels. Now he was powerless to offer resistance as they put handcuffs on his wrists and lifted him to his feet. Camille tried to get one last look at him as they passed, but the officers had him completely surrounded, like a group of Secret Service agents shielding the President. It had all happened so fast. One minute he was holding a gun to her head, the next he was being whisked away in the back of a police cargo van with six officers in tow.

  She looked at the scene around her, and the almost indescribable level of destruction he had left in his wake. It was entirely too much to process. She dropped hard to one knee. She felt no pain. She felt no fear. She felt nothing.

  Two paramedics sped past her pulling a stretcher. They stopped in front of Detective Sullivan and began the frenzied work of trying to save her life. It wasn’t until Camille was pulled up and lifted onto a stretcher of her own that she realized anyone had even noticed her.

  The back of the ambulance was cold and the faces hovering over her looked concerned. And all she could say before everything around her went black was: “Someone please call my father.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Camille checked herself out of the Rose Medical Center four days later, a full three days earlier than her doctors recommended. She knew it probably wasn’t wise to disobey their orders, but she couldn’t take the fanatical attention a moment longer.

  There were dozens of visitors during those four days, most of whom were part of the jovial celebration in her honor less than two weeks before. But many of the visitors to her hospital room were unexpected, including Julia’s sister Nicole, who visited on the second day. Even though she was clearly overwhelmed by her own grief and sense of loss, she sat at Camille’s bedside for over three hours.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am,” she said. “And at the risk of sounding corny, Julia would be extremely proud of you.”

  Camille smiled despite the physical and emotional pain that was otherwise battering her existence. “I’m the one who’s proud of her. You should be too. The bravery it took to create that disk was beyond anything I’m capable of. All Julia wanted was to do the right thing. And in the end, she did. That makes her the only hero in this particular scenario.”

  After Camille was released from surgery to remove bullet fragments from her arm, Paul turned the disk over to Lieutenant Hitchcock personally. The investigation of Elliott Richmond began immediately. The details of that investigation, as well as the contents of the disk, were leaked to the media, presumably by someone within the department, the very next day. Nicole heard those details, along with the rest of the country, and became immediately convinced that Richmond was her sister’s killer.

  “The people who did this to her are going to hang,” Nicole insisted. “Without you that wouldn’t have been possible. In my book, that makes you a hero too.”

  Camille wanted to protest Nicole’s declaration, but decided it was best not to.

  Based on the personal briefing she had received from Lieutenant Hitchcock, the man he had wrongly known as Officer Patrick Davies was cooperating fully in the investigation. Within hours of his arrest, Joseph Solomon had not only revealed his actual identity, but had confessed to the murder of Detective Graham, the attempted murders of Camille and Detective Sullivan, and revealed that he may have had ‘involvement’ in Julia’s murder. But aside from the claim that his conspirators were high-level officials whom he would reveal only after he was guaranteed full immunity, he offered nothing more about himself or the specifics of his involvement.

  A dozen fingerprint index checks came up with zero matches for Joseph Solomon, as did medical, DMV, and social security records. It was as if he never existed. Because of this, details about the shootings, and Solomon’s role in them, were being withheld from the public as the department scrambled to not only find any tangible information on their suspect, but also to figure out how this man with no traceable history ended up in a DPD uniform. Whatever they eventually discovered, the public relations nightmare was going to be unavoidable.

  The department may have had Solomon clean on one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder, but as far as establishing a firm connection between him, Elliott Richmond, and Julia’s murder, they were a million miles away from square one. And unless Solomon was willing to talk without the immunity that no judge in the free world would grant him, the chances of Elliott Richmond walking, at least in Camille’s mind, were roughly one hundred percent. But she wasn’t about to tell Julia’s sister that. “I hope they hang too,” was all she could bring herself to say.

  Immediately following the media leak, a reporter from the Denver Post showed up at Camille’s bedside, angling for the rights to an exclusive interview. Her father, and self-appointed watchdog, not-so-kindly escorted the reporter out of the room and into the elevator; with the promise of severe bodily injury should he ever return. He didn’t. But several others attempted to follow in his footsteps. Not one of them ever got close enough to ask a single relevant question, but their numbers and persistence were enough to let Camille know the heights that the story had reached in a relatively short time. She had kept the television turned off for fear of seeing her name and face on the news yet again. Based on the number of media visits she received, this fear had become a stark reality, and she would have to face it head on very soon.

  Camille discharged herself at nine a.m. She had just packed the last of her flowers and get-well cards for the trip home when one last visitor knocked on the hospital room door.

  “That’s probably the nurse coming to wheel you out,” Paul said as he went to the door.

  The man standing on the other side was not a nurse. He wore a modest suit and tie; his black shoes so polished they were almost too bright to look at.

  “May I help you?” Paul asked in his newly perfected watchdog tone.

  “Hello,” the man said shyly as he extended his hand. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping to see Ms. Grisham. My name’s Stephen Clemmons.”

  Paul didn’t hesitate to take his hand. “Paul Grisham. Nice to meet you, young man.” He smiled as he invited Clemmons inside.

  When she met Stephen’s gaze, a lump the size of an apple instantly formed in Camille’s throat and she thought she was going to cry.

  This is the man who Detective Graham insisted had brutally killed my best friend? She realized at that moment that man’s ability to become corrupted by power, greed, and pur
e hatred knew absolutely no bounds. If a fundamentally decent man like this was not protected from the destructive effects of that corruption, who in this world could possibly be?

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Camille said with a slightly broken voice as she shook his hand.

  “You as well. It looks like you’re on your way out of here.”

  “Against my doctor’s and father’s wishes. But I’m anxious to get home.”

  “I’m really glad to hear that. Listen, I don’t want to hold you up. I just stopped by to thank you for everything you’ve done in trying to help the police find out who did this. I only met Julia once, but I knew what a good person she was. Everyone at the firm did. She didn’t deserve any of this.”

  Camille nodded. “Neither did you, Stephen.”

  Something tightened in Clemmons’ face, but he softened it with a smile. “Thanks.”

  “So where do things stand right now? I read that you were released on bail.”

  “Yes. I still don’t know who posted it though. All I was told was that I was free to leave. The grand jury hearing is scheduled in two weeks, but my attorney says that with all of the recent developments, we may not even make it to that before the charges are dropped altogether.”

  Camille hoped he was right, but as was the case with Nicole Blair, she did not want to give voice to her overwhelming doubt. “You have a lot of people on your side, Stephen.”

  “Speaking of someone being on my side, I recently visited Detective Sullivan.”

  Camille’s eyes lit up. With her own stay in the hospital, she hadn’t had the chance to visit Sullivan. Lieutenant Hitchcock reported that she had been in surgery for three hours to remove bullet fragments from her leg and abdomen. But aside from a ruptured spleen, there was no serious internal damage and she was expected to make a full recovery. Camille had passed along a message of thanks for Hitchcock to deliver to the detective, but she looked forward to doing it personally very soon.