FATED TO THE PURPOSE (Richard and Morgana MacKenzie Mysteries Book 2)

by Jack Flanagan

  I turned to my escort and asked, “Will you please ask Moira to come here for a minute.”

  “Don’t move, Phil,” yelped Wagner. She then glared at me and said, “Tell us now what you know, MacKenzie.”

  “I will, but — ”

  “No buts about it, tell us what you know.”

  Again I tried to get pass Wagner’s obnoxious stubbornness, and calmly requested, “Please ask Moira to come here.”

  “No one else needs to get involved in this.” Wagner slapped the table in front of her. Then the agent waved her hand as if she were shooing flies from a bowl of soup. “We are finished with you. I’m not wasting any more time on you.”

  “ I only wanted to — ”

  “I don’t care what you want. If you don’t tell us what you know, I will charge you with obstruction of — ”

  “Getting the damned thing that you all are looking for?” I bellowed.

  “Richard, does Moira have it?” calmly asked Mrs. Prosper.

  “I believe that she does.”

  That got everyone’s attention.

  “The curious thing is,” I added, “that she may not realize it.”

  With semaphoric hand gestures from Wagner, Phil left the room and shortly returned with Moira, who was promptly seated at the table next to me. The poor woman seemed to have lost a degree of her mousiness. Though her shoulders were sloped forward and she slouched in her seat, her eyes seemed to show a rugged determination which emanated from somewhere deep inside her. There was an unexpected intensity about her that I had not seen when we were all back at the inn.

  “Well, Ms. Boyle, it has come to our attention that you may have something of ours,” bluntly started Wagner, ever the diplomat.

  Mrs. Prosper cleared her throat, and I spied the old woman shaking her head in disapproval while she looked at Wagner.

  “This something . . . the government is very interested in,” continued Wagner.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” protested Moira. “I don’t have anything of yours.”

  Not wanting to sit through a round of pointless protests and denials with Wagner and friends any longer than I had to, I tipped my hand and changed the game.

  “Ms. Burke,” I said as I took hold of Moira’s trembling hand, “the cross that is around your neck, where and when did you get it?”

  “Excuse me. Did you call me . . . Ms. Burke?”

  “I did. Your real name is Burke, Maureen Burke isn’t it?“

  “My Lord, I suspected something, but not this,” Mrs. Prosper said with honest surprise.

  “Mr. MacKenzie, my name is — ”

  “He prefers to be called Dr. MacKenzie, my dear,” interrupted Mrs. Prosper.

  “My name is Moira Boyle.”

  “The name that you were baptized with is Maureen Burke.” I corrected her with an actor’s confidence, for I was solely relying on my brother’s report. “When you were a child, you and your mother accompanied your father to Ireland on one of his diplomatic tours for the state department. During your stay, your dad decided to take the family on a weekend drive into the north country, not too far from the border of Northern Ireland.”

  Moira’s face went pale. She started to tear up and sniffle and repeated unconvincingly, her denial, “I’m Moira Boyle.”

  ”Your father had you believe that you and your mom were going to visit some ruins of an old castle.”

  “Mr. MacKenzie,” protested Wagner, “I don’t know what this has to do with —”

  “Agent Wagner, please!” sparked Mrs. Prosper, who had remained unusually quiet up to that point in time. Coldly eyeing Wagner, the old woman produced several tissues from the large handbag on her lap and gave them to Moira.

  Wagner kept quiet.

  I continued. “On the way, your father stopped — ”

  “He pulled off to the side of the road to take pictures of the countryside. He met a man,” Moira’s voice trembled. She used the tissues to dabbed the tears that began to run down her face. “I sat in the back of the car and watched my father talk to the man. It seemed that my dad expected to meet someone else. The two of them began to argue. The man had a gun. He marched my dad to the car. The stranger demanded my father’s briefcase that was in the front seat next to my mother. With threats that he would shoot my father, and over my dad’s pleas to my mother not to comply with the stranger’s demands, mother gave the case to the man.”

  Mrs. Prosper gave Moira another batch of tissues. The distraught woman nodded thanks and continued. “I sat in the back of the car, mesmerized. I watched the stranger rifle through my father’s briefcase until he got the papers that he was looking for. He slipped the papers into his jacket and thanked my father for being so cooperative and then . . . then without warning he shot my father in the head. My mother screamed. I screamed too.”

  I have to admit that it was difficult for me to listen to Moira’s story. I could see it in her eyes that she was reliving every second of that horrendous memory. She paused, blew her nose and continued. “My mother tried to slide over to the driver‘s side of the car. Maybe the key was still in the ignition and she was trying to get us away, I don’t know, but she never made it. The man with the gun opened the door, leaned into the car, and shot her. At that point, I was too scared to scream. I couldn’t even move. That man looked at my dying mother and spotted the beautiful gold and diamond celtic cross that she was wearing which my dad had given her as an anniversary present the week before. The man with the gun ripped the necklace off her neck. It was then when I screamed. That is when he gave me notice. The last thing I remembered was that he held my mother’s anniversary present in his tattooed hand and shot me with the gun in the other.”

  “The scar on your head,” I said.

  “Yes, that is one of the many scars from that day which has never healed,” replied Moira. “I blacked out when I was hit. The murderer must have thought I was dead and left without a trace. I came to in an ambulance going to the hospital. I didn’t learn about my parents’ deaths until two days after the incident. The government flew my aunt to Ireland. She told me what had happened.”

  By this time, Wagner’s patience was waning again. “Forgive me, but I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

  “It’s important,” I insisted, “because this man, Foley or Fitzgerald whatever his name is — ”

  “Foley,” interjected Prosper. “Let’s keep it simple.”

  “This guy Foley who died in the very next room next to Mrs. Prosper’s, was the same man who shot Moira and killed her parents. Isn’t that so Moira?”

  “What?” responded Wagner.

  Moira sat silently staring off into space.

  “Isn’t that so, Moira?“ I asked again.

  She gently nodded and used the crumpled tissues in her hand to wipe more tears.

  “I suspected him immediately as my parents’ murderer when I saw him the night he arrived at the inn. His tattoo made me sure that it was him. I saw the tattoo when he took out a five dollar bill to tip me for a beer I served him. When he gave me the money, he looked at me with that same evil gaze which he gave to my dying mother as he snatched the cross from her neck, so many neck years ago. And then he said — ” Moira soft tears and sniffles turn into sobs. “That murdering old piece of filth wanted me to visit him up in his room — telling me that we Irish should get acquainted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wagner interrupted in a tone of indignation,” but I see no relevance between — ”

  “The relevance, Agent Wagner,” I said, “is that Moira took Foley’s invitation and went to his room, and during that early morning visit, she took your precious missing item.”

  Again, Wagner was caught unprepared for my response and fell silent. Moira blew her nose, and Prosper, taking a grandmotherly tone, gently asked, “Moira, you went to Mr. Foley’s room?”

  Moira nodded.

  “But why, my dear,” asked the ever inquisitive old woman, “if you tho
ught that he killed your parents.”

  “I wanted to confront him. I wanted to make him confess to what he did. But I didn’t kill him. . . . I didn’t take anything.”

  “But you did, Moira,” I said.

  “No, he was alive when I left.”

  “No, I don’t believe that you did kill him, not intentionally anyway,” piped up Mrs. Prosper. “The ME report says that your Mr. Foley died of . . . well, in layman’s terms a type of stroke.”

  That tidbit of information was a surprise to me on all sorts of levels. How on earth did this old lady get her hands on Foley’s ME’s report? Who in hell is this Mrs. Prosper, I wondered? And the fact that Foley died of a stroke was news to me; I didn’t expect that. It made sense when I considerate it, and it didn’t violate any parameters of my imagined reconstruction of events.

  “But you did take something, Moira,” I said. “You took that cross that you are wearing.” I reached out to the poor crying woman, and she slowly slip the leather lanyard securing the crucifix off her neck and handed it to me. I examined both.

  The leather neck string appeared old and a little frayed. A little trace of the leather was left on my skin as I pulled it through my fingers. As for the cross itself, my initial thought was that it was surprisingly light in weight for its size. I remembered when I first saw Moira wearing the cross at the time of Foley’s death. I found the cross to be slightly awkward, too big to be fashionable. With hints of showmanship and bravado, I held the crucifix up to the overhead ceiling light in order to catch what, I hoped and prayed, would be normally an imperceptible shadow of a seam.

  “Well, MacKenzie,” said Wagner without any attempt to hide her annoyance, “do you see anything on that cross, or are you holding a religious service?”

  I saw what I hoped that I would see, and with a firm hold with one hand on the horizontal section of the cross, I pulled on the vertical section with a quick jerk. The cross split into two. And with a little manipulation, the wood veneer pulled away to reveal a computer stick drive.

  “I bet you a case of Scotch that this is your missing . . . ah, whatever, Agent Wagner,” I declared triumphantly. I passed to her the bottom section of the crucifix with its disengaged end revealing itself to be a USB connection.

  Wagner toyed with the object staring at it almost in awe for several seconds. She then reached down beneath the table and brought up her laptop. Within moments, she pronounced, “MacKenzie is right. This is it.”

  “Damn it!” said the old woman which was not the response that I expected from Mrs. Prosper.

  “Hey, you wanted me to help,” I said, “so, I helped. You got what you were looking for, a deal is a deal.” I concluded nervously. I had no idea what was going on between Wagner and Prosper, or whether or not I was in trouble or not.

  Ignoring me, Wagner barked at Moira, “How did you know about this?”

  “Know about what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What motivated you to take this, Moira?” Wagner had removed the drive from the computer and waved it about as if she was putting out a lit match as she spoke.

  Mrs. Prosper calmly asked, “Yes, Moira, why did you take this?”

  “He was going to rape me?”

  “He was going to rape you?” responded Wagner with a heavy dose of cynicism. “So you damn near strangled him with the decorative ropes in his room and you steal his cross. That doesn’t make any sense, Moira. And if it doesn’t make sense, it’s not the truth.” Wagner slammed her hand down on the table. “You freely went to his room, there was no rape. You’re a big girl. You knew what he wanted. Now, why did you take the cross?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t really know.” Moira began to grit her teeth. Her eyes teared up, but those tears didn’t mitigate the fiery stare that she gave to Wagner.

  “Who’s working with you, Moira?”

  “What,” squeaked out the badgered woman.

  “Who wanted you to steal the cross?” Wagner said again.

  “There isn’t anybody.”

  “Why did you take the cross?”

  “I don’t — ”

  “Why did you take the cross?”

  “For my mother! I did it in the name of my mother,” Moira shouted back in unleashed anger. “He killed my parents. I went to his room to make him admit it.”

  “How were you going to do that, my Dear?” gently asked Mrs. Prosper and, by so doing, restored some civility to the inquiry.

  “I didn’t know. I wasn’t thinking right. I just felt that I had to confront him.” Moira took a breath and paused. With renewed composure, she said, “When I got to his room and knocked at his door, I hesitated; I had second thoughts. But before I had the chance to leave, he opened the door and invited me in. We chatted about Ireland over several glasses of wine. By the time we had killed the bottle, Foley became . . . frisky and started to touch me. Needing him to get away from me, I asked if he had anything else to drink. He told me that he did; he excused himself to wash out the glasses in the bathroom. He said that he had something stronger than wine, and asked me if I would like some poteen which he had — ”

  “French fries and gravy?” asked Wagner.

  “Poteen, not poutine. Poteen is Irish moonshine. Go on,” interjected Prosper, preventing Wagner from further interrupting Moira’s story.

  “He didn’t recognize me as the little girl whom he thought he had killed years ago. No, by the look in his eyes, that pig had only one thing in his mind. And he proved it to me when he was pouring our new drinks, I saw him put something in one of the glasses. He gave me the suspicious one and we clinked our glasses in a toast to a fulfilling evening. We both took a sip from our drinks, at least he did. I pretended to. I put my glass down, took a deep breath, walked to him, and gave him a kiss. He wasn’t prepared for an action on my part so soon, he barely manage to reach over, put his drink on the dresser top. He held me tight, and pushed his tongue into — ”

  “Fine. We get the picture. Where are you leading us?” Patience was not one of Wagner’s virtues.

  “I squirmed out of his grip, and coyly said to him, with a feigned lisp I might add, that before we did anything, that maybe he should take a shower. With a half-hearted protest, the stupid old pig was eager to please. He stripped down, placed the cross on the bed table, and dashed into the bathroom. He wanted to freshen-up, and I didn’t object. Because when he was busy, I went through his jacket pockets and found a vile of liquid ketamine.”

  “Ketamine?” Wagner murmured.

  “An animal tranquilizer,” answered Prosper.

  “A date rape drug,” I added.

  “A vicious type of date rape drug, Mr. MacKenzie,” added Moira. “It can cause hallucinations, rapid heartbeat, and muscle immobilization, among other things. My aunt is a veterinarian, and she has piles of literature about the abuse of the ketamine, and other drugs like it. . . . And this murdering pig was going to use it on me. Well, I had news for him.”

  I watched the fire drain from Moira’s eyes. Her tone continually drifted from one of revenge and defiance to that of resignation as she recounted what had happened.

  “ I switched drinks with Foley when he was in the shower. The fool didn’t notice the difference when he gulped his drink down with, what he called, a male performance pill. Ketamine worked fast, especially with all the wine and the poteen he drank. I didn’t even get my bra off before that pig started to feel the effects.”

  “It was then that you confronted him with who you really were?” I calmly asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Wagner. “Foley gets to be a little woozy, and so, he confesses to you about killing your parents? Is that what you are telling me? After keeping the murders a secret for all these decades, he throws caution to the wind and just lets it all come out to you.“

  “I hoped so. . . . That was my plan,” stammered Moira.

  “You’re lying. Tell us what really happened,” demanded Wag
ner.

  I didn’t find Agent Wagner’s tone very helpful. I began to think that she could make a priest doubt his vocation by asking him for street directions. So before she could let loose another salvo of sarcasm, I diplomatically tried to negotiate a cease-fire.

  “For God’s sake, Wagner, let her finish!” I said.

  “Who in hell are you to say anything?“ countered Wagner. “I’m not sure why you are even here, MacKenzie, during this — ”

  “Agent Wagner, be still, or you will find yourself at a desk in a dank basement counting paperclips before you can utter another word,” pronounced Prosper. Wagner shut up immediately; Moira gasped, and my heart to skip a beat.

  The room became very, very quiet.

  Mrs. Prosper broke the silence first. “If you had bothered to read the full toxicology report, Agent Wagner, you would have seen that Foley’s body contained traceable amounts of the drug in question.”

  The outward display of empathy from Prosper and myself seemed to produce in Moira some sense of trust. She gave the two of us the slightest detectable grin when she said, “He did confess. My plan worked.”

  “Foley must have been very, very disoriented once the drug kicked in,” I remarked.

  “Yes, he was, very,” Moira said and then smiled. “He collapsed naked half onto the bed, barely able to move his limbs or to speak. My chance had come; I knew that was the time for me to reveal to him who I was. I described in detail the scene of my parents’ murder. I showed him the scar on my head. He was so crazed with a drug-induced fear, that I’m not sure that he knew who or what I was — the little girl left for dead from years ago or an avenging angel from beyond the grave. Thinking about it now, I find it ironic that through his own deviousness, Foley made it so easy for me to confront him.”

  “And to get a confession from him in writing, well done,” I said.

  “How did you know that? I didn’t tell?” Moira’s eyes opened wide. “The suicide note.”

  “That was clever thinking, producing the bottom half of Foley’s confession. Lucky for you that his last testament was worded the way it was. All you had to do is to tear off the bottom his confession and, voila, you have a signed suicide note.”