Intimate Betrayal

by Linda Barlow

  “But he didn’t leave. He started looking around, as if he was searching for something. Then he came right for the steps where I was hiding. I scurried down the stairs and tucked myself away into a corner. I figured he was coming down into the basement to get something. A tool, maybe. I waited and listened, but I didn’t hear him come down the steps. So finally I snuck out again to see where he had gone, and I saw him crouching there, on the sacristy steps below the high altar. Right where I had been. He was peering out into the sanctuary.”

  “Like you, he found it a good place to observe what was happening,” said Matt.

  “Yeah. I thought that was very weird. But I didn’t put it together. I didn’t know what the fuck—excuse me—I didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t have a clue. I did notice he was wearing some kind of gloves, though. I stupidly thought he just didn’t want to get his hands dirty.”

  Annie and Matt exchanged glances. Sam had worn gloves to ensure that everybody’s fingerprints except his own were on the scaffolding.

  “So he waited and I waited,” Vico went on. “I just wanted him to go away and not find me. I didn’t want him anywhere near my hiding places.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Nothing for a while. I was getting real bored. Then I saw him come alert, like. He tensed up, and it seemed as if he was suddenly watching very closely. I started to get a bad feeling about this. I mean, he was all excited and there was something up, I knew it. But I still had no clue.

  “He was watching something that was happening in the cathedral, but I couldn’t see it. If only I’d known what he was doing!” Vico’s voice rose in pain. “If only I’d realized what time it was and that soon my uncle would be coming in to work. But it’s dark down here and I was tired and I’d lost track of the time. And besides, he was the architect. What interest could he possibly have in a workman like my uncle? It just never clicked.”

  He paused, and Annie saw that sweat had broken out on his forehead. “I didn’t know anything until I heard the scream.” He shuddered. “There was this horrible scream and then a crash, and I didn’t know—I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, I was just watching him—Brody—and he waited for a moment after the scream, but only for a moment—like maybe he was afraid somebody else had heard it or would come running or something. He opened the door and he slipped out, and by this time I was shaking. But I followed him and got back into my spot where he had been and looked out.” He stopped again, his face pale. For several seconds he coughed into his cupped hands.

  “All Brody did was take one look. Like, to be sure he was dead. Then he ran to the north door and in a flash he was outta there.”

  “And you?”

  “I—I went out. And I saw who it was. And I looked at the way the scaffolding had collapsed, and then I knew. He’d killed him, and he’d done it deliberately. And that was when I knew that I’d have to kill him, too. Brody. Vendetta,” he said, his young eyes gone totally cold.

  “I think you should let the police handle it, Vico,” Paolina said, speaking now for the first time. “This is not Sicily. If you kill Sam Brody, you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.”

  “Besides, I’ve known him a lot longer than you have,” Matt said grimly. “Sam Brody is mine.”

  “Where are they?” Brody asked.

  Fletcher watched him walk up the main aisle of the cathedral, holding a big flashlight to light his way. He was still standing in the pulpit, looking out over an imaginary congregation.

  “Are they still in the crypt? Have you checked on them? How badly injured are they?”

  Fletcher stared at him. He was curious about Brody’s hair, which gleamed as golden as the finest and most sacred communion plate.

  “Jack? Are you okay, man?”

  “I’m fine,” he managed to reply. “You’re here for Vico? Take him and go.” He wanted to be alone—alone with Annie.

  “Let’s see who you’ve got locked in the crypt first, Jack, okay?”

  Brody led the way across the sanctuary, around the high altar, and down the short set of steps to the crypt door. Fletcher followed slowly. He felt as if he were floating, his feet whispering over the marble floor.

  He was in a nice, warm dream as he pointed out the key on the hook, the key to the crypt. The dream thinned a bit when he saw Sam pull a pistol from his jacket and hold it at the ready. He held it as if he knew know to use it, too, which was something Fletcher hadn’t expected of golden-boy Sam Brody.

  Maybe it was true, what Annie had said.

  Maybe Brody had been lying to him all along.

  Slowly, Brody unlocked and pulled open the heavy door.He directed the harsh beam of his flashlight into the crypt and around it, the gun raised, his finger on the trigger….

  Abruptly Brody turned, and this time both the light and the gun were directed at Fletcher. “The crypt is empty. What the hell kind of crazy game are you playing?”

  “No!” Fletcher cried, ignoring the gun, pushing past it, rushing into the low, circular chamber. He darted his own flashlight from side to side, top to bottom. The construction debris was still there, but his prisoners had vanished.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Standing outside the cathedral a few minutes later, Sam stared at the magnificent building rising out of the mundane architecture around it, shaking his head over what he had to do.

  It was sad, really.

  Tragic.

  But if Matthew and Annie really had the two versions of the CAD file, there was little choice. If he didn’t destroy all the evidence of construction fraud, Brody Associates would be ruined. They would never recover from the scandal. And he’d lose all those lucrative plum jobs that the cathedral project itself had dropped into his lap.

  Shit, he would have to go to Brazil. The thought depressed him. His life was here. Matthew Carlyle, his obsession, was here. For the first time, he wondered how he would feel when Matt Carlyle was no longer alive to plot and plan against.

  He’d know soon.

  He had left Fletcher standing guard at the main exit from the cathedral basement while he’d come outside to the construction trailers. Annie, Matt, Vico, and his girlfriend were all down there somewhere beneath the floor of the cathedral. He and Fletcher had found the secret exit from the crypt.

  Armed with flashlights and guns, he and Fletcher had made a brief attempt to negotiate the crawl space under the main body of the cathedral. They’d heard scuffling sounds in the distance as the fugitives had scurried away like rats, but the area was vast. Flushing them out of there before morning would be just about impossible.

  Locked in one of the trailers were some supplies he had placed there several nights ago. Checking carefully to make sure no one was watching, Sam slipped into the trailer and recovered a supply of explosives used in construction for blasting foundations and destroying old buildings. As an architect, he was, of course, familiar with explosives and how to use them. He had hoped he wouldn’t need them, but he’d wanted to be prepared in case he did.

  He loaded the explosives into a large sports bag. Then he pulled out his copy of the blueprints and unfolded them. With his flashlight he carefully studied the design to make absolutely certain he knew where to place the explosives in order to do the most damage. He made a mental note of the primary weight-bearing columns.

  It was truly a shame to destroy something so beautiful, he thought as he glanced again at the graceful neo-Gothic walls of the cathedral. But it was the only way to take care of all his problems at once.

  The people who were most dangerous to him—Vico, Paolina, and Annie—were in there right now. Any charges they might have made against him would be silenced by their deaths. As for Barbara Rae, he would take care of her immediately afterward. She lived next door, and he would make it look as if she too had been killed in the blast.

  Best of all, Matthew was in there. The twenty-one-year thorn in Sam’s side was about to be crushed and removed. If it wasn’t exactly the way he�
��d thought it would happen, well, nothing in life ever was. He would have preferred to look directly into Matt’s eyes as the end came. For years Sam had fantasized that his face would be the last thing Matt would ever see. The smile of his tormentor, the eyes of his judge.

  This was better, though. Once the building was destroyed, it would be difficult for anyone to prove that there had been any discrepancies between the original CAD drawings and the actual construction. In fact, it was doubtful that anybody would even care. All the attention would focus on the fact that a work of architectural splendor and unparalleled beauty had been leveled by a madman.

  Sam took his sports bag and darted over to Fletcher’s trailer. It was locked, but Sam had all the master keys. He put on a pair of latex surgical gloves and went inside.

  The place was neater than he’d expected. But there were a few odd things lying around. He took a quick glance through a copy of Soldier of Fortune. It was amazing what you could buy through mail order these days. Guns of all sorts. Knives. Materials that could be combined with others to make bombs.

  Excellent.

  He also saw a couple of pamphlets from some antigay organization called Heterosexual Nation. Antigay in San Francisco—the man was living in the wrong city.

  He went to the computer and turned it on. He opened a new file and,using as a model the copy of one of the threatening letters that Annie had received recently, Sam composed a similar one:

  I have warned you but you failed to obey. Now it is TOO LATE. The Hand of the Lord will rain fire upon you. The House of Pride will fall!

  He signed it Jehovah’s Pitchfork, then he turned on the printer and printed it out.

  He then laid the paper on the countertop in front of the computer screen and got a fresh sheet. With exquisite care, Sam began to print in block letters, copying from the original. He did only six words, then put down the pen as if he’d been interrupted. He didn’t want to press his luck on the handwriting analysis.

  He shoved both the printout and the handwritten note underneath a newspaper on the desk. If Fletcher came back here briefly, he probably wouldn’t notice it. When the police started investigating—which they would do almost immediately after a major explosion—they would find the note and the file and draw their own conclusions.

  Stealthily he left the trailer and headed back to the cathedral, carrying his sports bag in one hand, still wearing the thin latex gloves. The entire scheme was risky, but with any luck, no one would ever suspect that anybody except Fletcher had been involved.

  They would blame Jack Fletcher, exactly as Sam had planned from the start.

  Jack Fletcher, who, unknown to anyone but Sam, had a prison record for sexual assault.

  Jack Fletcher, who also had access to construction site explosives.

  Jack Fletcher, psychotic and perfect scapegoat.

  “It was like everything crystallized,” Vico said, describing his feelings and actions after the murder of his uncle. “If I admitted what I’d seen, either Brody would get me or the police would. If it was Brody, I was dead. If it was the cops, I was in the slammer, probably for good. I was already wanted—they’d throw my ass in jail and I’d never get out.”

  “So you decided to hide out?”

  “I had to. At first it was just to figure out what to do. And I was hoping the cops would get cracking and solve the case. And if they didn’t, well, I knew the killer and that’s all it would take, really. If the law didn’t get him, someday I would.”

  “Well, we’ve got him now,” Matt said. “We need you to come in and talk to the cops. We have proof tying him to a scheme to defraud the owners of the United Path Church for what appears to be several million dollars. We have a motive for Giuseppe’s murder, and we have the computer evidence of the fraud. Best of all, we have you as an eyewitness to the murder. It’ll be enough. Hell, it’s a lot more than they had on me when I was arrested.”

  “He’s not going in unless they make a deal to drop the drug-selling charges,” Paolina cut in. She sounded fiercely protective. “He’s hidden this long and he’ll hide a few more days if necessary. If he helps the police, they’ve got to help him.”

  Annie looked at Matt. “Do you think they’ll do that?”

  “Probably, yeah. Deals like that are made all the time. I agree he shouldn’t surrender until the deal is actually made, though. I could get one of my lawyers to put something together with the prosecutor.”

  Annie shook her head. “It’s still so hard for me to believe. Sam Brody killed your uncle because your uncle knew that the structure of the cathedral wasn’t sound,” she said, almost to herself.

  Vico raised his eyebrows. “That’s not the only reason he killed him.”

  Annie blinked. “It’s not?”

  “No. The day before he died, my uncle told me that he was worried about something. He had met Sam Brody on the day you brought him to the construction site. He recognized him. And then a few days later he met Matthew Carlyle.” Vico glanced nervously at Matt. “He knew they were friends, good friends. But he knew something that he now realized nobody else knew. He knew that Sam Brody had been the lover of Mr. Carlyle’s wife. The one that was murdered and dumped in the Bay.”

  “Sam was her lover?” Annie said.

  “Yes. My uncle knew it because he had caught them together in the choir loft of the old church that Reverend Acker used to run. He’d seen them, naked. There was, like, no doubt.”

  “Oh, wow,” Annie said.

  “Later, Mrs. Carlyle begged him to remain silent. He gave his word of honor.

  “Then she died. He was out of the country at the time; he didn’t know the details of the murder trial here. It wasn’t until he returned and Mr. Carlyle was set free and he heard some of the news coverage that he realized that no one had ever identified her lover, or even proved that she hada lover.

  “So he asked me what I thought he should do. Should he go to the authorities and give them his information, or should he go first to Mr. Brody and tell him that he wished to be released from his long-ago promise? We both thought the honorable thing to do was talk to Mr. Brody first.” He paused. “Neither of us could imagine that Mr. Brody could be a killer.”

  “So did he go to Sam?”

  Vico nodded. “And Sam killed him the very next day.”

  Matt had been silent and motionless during this revelation. Now, though, Annie heard him heave a deep breath.

  “Show me the fastest way out of here, Vico,” he said.

  “Matt, no!”

  “This man was the best friend I’ve ever had. Or so I believed for over twenty years. I’m going to find him, and then, by God, I’m going to deal with him in a manner the bastard will understand!”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Darcy not only copied the files off Sam’s computer onto a disk, she printed them out on the plotter. And then she reduced and photocopied them for good measure. Nothing was going to happen to these babies—not if she had anything to say about it.

  When she was sure that the evidence had been properly copied and printed and backed up, she searched Sam’s computer files for anything else that might be incriminating.

  When she came to his electronic mail software she viewed the log to check his recent messages. She noticed a couple to Paul McEnerney, and she quickly called them up on the screen. But they were routine—nothing incriminating.

  Then she noticed that Sam’s “trash” file, where old, unneeded messages are stored, was set to hold one hundred pieces of “trash.” That was high. Her own was set to hold twenty. When that number was exceeded, the trash was automatically dumped.

  She tried to call up files listed in “trash.” The software refused. They were no longer accessible from the e-mail program.

  Remembering Matt’s tricks, though, she exited the e-mail program and used DOS commands to examine the contents of the directory where the e-mail software was stored. Sure enough, the trashed files were still there. Apparently they didn’t actua
lly get deleted until the entire trash grouping was “dumped.”

  There were eighty-nine old messages in Sam’s trash. Tedious though the process was, Darcy decided to go through them one by one.

  She was about two-thirds of the way through when she found what she was looking for. An e-mail from a year and a half ago to Paul McEnerney with an attached file transfer: “I’m attaching my new version of the document. The utmost discretion is advised.”

  The file he’d attached was his fraudulent version of the cathedral CAD file.

  “We’ve got him!” she crowed. “Sam and Paul McEnerney, we’ve got them both!”

  Computers, she decided, were beautiful things.

  She was about to close down the system and get out of there with the evidence when another file name caught her eye: “Fletcher.txt.” She called it up and found a police record stating that one John Albert Fletcher had served a prison sentence in Florida for sexual battery. The prison psychologist had noted that he was subject to “obsessive-compulsive behavior, especially regarding women, and occasional delusional episodes.” He also had “difficulty in controlling his aggressive impulses” and “episodes of homicidal ideation.”

  Fletcher had had some treatment in prison, and was described by the same psychologist one year later as “much improved and able to function in society.”

  Sam had hired the guy, keeping quiet about what he knew. At one time this probably would have inspired admiration in her, Darcy thought wryly. Good old Sam, what a fair and tolerant man.

  Now all she could think was that Sam had known he could use these facts to his advantage. He’d hired a crook to manage a scam.

  Meanwhile, Annie and Matt had gone running off to the cathedral in the middle of the night at the behest of a mental case. The more she thought about it, the less she liked the idea.

  Darcy had a sudden image of the tarot spread the last time she had laid out the deck. The Tower had kept coming up, even though she did the spread again three times. The Tower exploding in a massive wave of destruction, with rocks and bodies hurled out with tremendous force.