The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  Holding the palm of his hand over his cell phone, Washington said, “This is going to take a few minutes. I’m waiting for a patch through to prison security. When did the van leave?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, maybe only a few minutes ago,” I said.

  The feds exchanged glances.

  “Come with me,” said Harper.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  One of the benefits of law enforcement is great parking. While I was in a multi-level structure half a mile away, Harper had left her Dodge Charger within fifty feet of the courthouse door.

  Washington followed us outside, but didn’t get into the car. He was a big man and the Charger didn’t need any extra weight slowing it down.

  “You two go get the van. I’ll call you on your cell, Harper, soon as I get Corrections on the phone,” said Washington.

  “With me, Eddie. Somebody might have to talk Howell down,” said Harper.

  We got into the car.

  It felt like I had an insect trapped inside my head and slowly but surely it was eating my brain. A black insect that you could call stupidity and guilt. I felt that thing bite into my skull as surely as I’ve ever felt anything. I buckled my seatbelt. Throwing the muscle car into reverse, Harper thumped her boot through the accelerator. One hand on the wheel, one hand typing on a satellite navigation system attached to the dash with a plastic bracket.

  Horns and brakes met us and a brown station wagon swerved past, the driver thumping on the horn in the center of his wheel.

  Harper ignored it all. She pumped the clutch, flicked the gear stick and ate the gas pedal. I chewed my knuckle and punched the dash. This was all my fault.

  A call came in on her cell phone, and she hit a button on the steering console. A Bluetooth system took the call through the stereo.

  “Prison transport can’t raise the van,” said Washington. “The radio’s been broken for a week, and they ain’t got around to fixing it yet. They’re trying the driver and guard’s cell phones but nothing so far. All I got is a location from the tracker. They’re headed north on the Tarrytown Road and in less than a minute they’ll take the slipway for interstate 287, Westbound.”

  “Got it. Stay on the line,” said Harper.

  We blew through the intersection on Main Street and hooked a left onto Hamilton Road. My right foot buried itself in the floor as I willed the car on, faster and faster.

  Traffic up ahead. A white van in the distance. My heart leapt. This could be the prison van. I sat up and regretted it as Harper swerved right to avoid a motorcycle, narrowly avoiding the crash barrier and then brought us back into the lane. The van was closer now and I swore when I saw that it was a camper van.

  “Take it easy,” said Harper. “We’ll get there.”

  I didn’t know this part of New York. The roads were unfamiliar even though I’d probably driven them before at one time or another. We were on a two-lane road. Speed limit fifty-five miles an hour. Harper hit ninety as we shot past the camper. I turned around when I heard the camper driver’s horn. The whole side of the van was shaking from the wind displacement.

  The Dodge lurched left, then right to correct and I was almost thrown into Harper’s lap. Grabbing the door handle saved me and I managed to right myself in my seat.

  “There’s the slipway for the 287, where are they now?” said Harper.

  “Hang on,” said Washington.

  We took the single-lane slipway far too fast. Harper feathered the brakes and we began to snake left and right, the back end wobbling and Harper fighting the wheel as the tail of the Dodge threatened to throw us into one of the concrete crash barriers on either side of the road.

  “They’re just passing the exit at the Pearson Center,” said Washington.

  The Dodge continued to fight Harper until we turned onto the 287. A three-lane expressway that moved fast and had little traffic. Speed limit was still fifty-five.

  Nobody was doing fifty-five.

  Acceleration pinned me to my seat and Harper took us past half a dozen vehicles, swerving in and out of the fast lane. Going through the bend, we saw the van.

  “Any update on contacting the driver?” said Harper.

  I bit my lip and prayed.

  “Negative,” said Washington.

  The white van had two small windows at the rear, set high up. It sat in the center lane at a steady sixty. Harper took her foot off the gas and came parallel to the van. It was on our right.

  “Put on your siren,” I said.

  “This is a personal vehicle. No blues and twos, no siren,” said Harper.

  The same small, square windows, high up on the driver’s side of the van. Each one was reinforced glass and too high for anyone to see inside. Our only chance was to get level with the cab and flag down the driver.

  As we leveled with the van driver Harper hit her horn.

  “Take this,” she said, handing me her FBI badge and ID.

  I wound down my window, held out the badge and signaled to the van driver to pull over. The sound from Harper’s horn drew the driver’s attention.

  He switched his gaze back to the road and the van sped up.

  I called out to the driver but he couldn’t hear me over the roar of the engines and the whipping of the air as we cut through it.

  “Shit, did he see the badge?” said Harper.

  “He saw it,” I said. “Probably thinks it’s fake and we’re trying to bust somebody out of custody.”

  Increasing our speed to match the van, Harper angled closer, and told me to try again. Maybe the driver of the van would take a better look this time.

  Same result, he sped up. Only this time he gave us the finger before he put his foot down.

  Every second that passed, every slap of my hand on the passenger door of the Dodge, every inch I extended my arm to show the driver the badge – all of it felt like we were already too late.

  “It’s another twenty minutes to Sing Sing,” said Harper, glancing at her navigation screen. “It’s interstate virtually the whole way. We won’t hit a stop light for another ten miles. You think we could wait that long?” she said.

  I brought both of my arms back inside the car, and tried desperately to think of another way to get the guard’s attention. I didn’t need to decide if we could wait another ten minutes before stopping the van. I knew, somehow, that we couldn’t wait another minute.

  “We need to stop this van, right now,” I said.

  “How sure are you that he’s going to harm himself?”

  “I’m certain,” I said.

  “Any luck on the cell phones, Joe?” said Harper.

  “They’re trying. I’ve got a black and white en route and a paramedic. They’ll be there in five,” said Washington.

  Harper slapped the steering wheel, “Hold on,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m going to get the van on my side and then I’m gonna shoot out the front tire,” said Harper.

  She braked and let the van pass us, then slipped in behind it and followed through into the right hand lane and increased our speed so she’d be the closest to the van.

  “You’ll flip it if you take out a tire. At this speed you’ll kill everyone,” I said.

  Harper reached into her jacket and drew a Glock. She placed it between her legs and lowered her window.

  “Wait, come up closer and shoot above the tire, into the engine,” I said.

  “That won’t stop it. I couldn’t get through the engine block with a shot gun,” she said.

  “No, but you might hit the air intake or a distributor, that’ll kill the engine instantly.”

  She glanced at me once, then the road ahead and drew level with the side of the van, just slightly forward of the cab. Right hand on the steering wheel. Her left grabbed the Glock and she extended her arm out of the window. Her head flicked quickly between the road and the sight at the end of the barrel. She increased the pressure on the a
ccelerator.

  Almost level.

  “Wait! We got a guard, they’re stopping,” said Washington.

  Sure enough, we flew past the van as the driver hit the brakes. Harper drew her hand back inside the car, steered right and took us onto the hard shoulder. I turned around in my seat and saw the van had followed us and was coming to a stop.

  Harper brought the Charger to a standstill, grabbed her ID off the dash and threw open the door. She was faster than me getting out of the car, but my long stride caught up with her sprint just as we reached the van. A guard stood outside with a shotgun ready, the stock against his shoulder, finger on the trigger.

  Harper held up her badge and I ran past them both, toward the back. The doors were open and I leapt inside. My heart catching in my throat. No other guards were in back.

  Six reinforced doors to individual mobile cells.

  I called out to the guard, “I need keys, which one is …”

  My left foot slid out from under me and I thrust a hand out to steady myself.

  I didn’t need to ask which cubicle was Howell’s any more.

  A dark stain spread out from beneath door three.

  “Get this open now!”

  I felt the floor shift and dip with the guard leaping into the van, and I stood back to let him open the door. He opened the door just at the exact same moment his right foot slipped out from underneath him and he fell back. He got up and stared numbly into the open transport cell. He didn’t dive in to help, didn’t call for assistance, he didn’t do anything. Pushing him out of the way I flung open the door and when I saw inside, I stopped being angry with the guard.

  The sight was enough.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said the guard.

  A transport cell is a square, four-foot-by-four-foot box, with just enough room to sit down. They are normally painted industrial gray, with a ridged plastic floor and a steel seat. No seat belts.

  The gray was gone. Words floated in front of my mind.

  Red. Soaked. Dead.

  The cubicle was a riot of blood.

  Something inside me collapsed.

  Howell wasn’t moving. He’d slipped off the seat and fallen under it, his legs folded awkwardly beneath him. I slipped my hands underneath his arms and lifted him out of there and laid him on the floor of the van.

  I checked for a pulse.

  Barely, just faintly I detected the weak throb beneath his jaw. The guard was over the initial shock. He’d grabbed an emergency kit from the front of the van and was cracking open the lid. A bandage and gauze soon found its way to Howell’s neck, where a strong, steady flow of blood was streaming from a wound in his throat. The guard told me to keep pressure on the wound. I pressed down on the right side of his neck as hard as I could. Howell’s face was almost pale blue. He’d slit his wrists too. The guard grabbed the bandages, doubled them up and began tying a tight tourniquet on each arm, just above the elbow.

  In the distance, I heard the wail of sirens.

  I watched as the guard slapped Howell, peeled open his eyelids and shined a torch into them, shouting his name – trying everything that he could to wake him up.

  In the corner of the little red cell, I saw my pin – shining, even in the blood.

  With one eye on the guard, I kept one-handed pressure on Howell’s neck, and reached across with my other. The pin was wet and sticky. I put it in my pants pocket. I glanced up. The guard was still working on Howell and Harper stood outside the van with her back to me, waving her arms to flag down the paramedics. In the distance I could see the flashing lights from the ambulance.

  “He’s going into arrest. Move over, keep the pressure up,” said the guard. I shimmied round to give him space to work. He began chest compressions, and then slipped a rubber funnel with a paper cover over Howell’s face so he could blow into his mouth without tasting blood.

  I could feel Howell’s blood soaking through the knees of my pants. There was blood on my shirt, and my hands. I kept thinking that I’d allowed this to happen. This was my fault.

  The paramedics pulled up and Harper turned to face me.

  She saw it then. The guilt was on my face as plain as the red stains on my hands. I couldn’t hide it.

  There was no getting away from this.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The drive back to the courthouse took a lot longer than the journey out. Even though we had all that time, we said nothing until Harper made the right turn off of Main Street.

  “What did he use to cut his throat, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “They didn’t find anything in the van.”

  “Maybe he still had it on him, somewhere,” I said, gazing out of the window at the courthouse as we drove past.

  She had agreed to take me to my car so I could change into my spare suit and shirt.

  “You know he’s alive because of you,” she said.

  I didn’t thank her. He was also almost certainly going to die because of me. He’d lost a lot of blood. It was all my fault for buying the pin. No way I would ever have handed it over, I just wanted him to see it so he would cooperate. I should’ve said no, I should’ve resisted.

  Harper said, “How did you know he was going to try to kill himself?”

  “I just knew,” I said.

  She nodded. “I guess sometimes you’ve got to go with what you know in your heart.”

  The pulse of the engine invaded the car, and Harper fell silent. Her eyes drifted across to the bloodstains on my knees, my hands, my shirt and jacket sleeves. The iron tang of blood in the air was so strong you could almost taste it.

  “Listen, it’s not every day a fed helps me out. I want to know why. Sure, you’re not convinced Howell is guilty. I get it. But it takes more than that to risk your job by helping me. If there’s another reason why you’re helping, I want to know. I need to know.”

  Traffic backed up, and Harper touched the brakes, slowing us down to a crawl.

  “I was out of the Academy maybe a year when I went on a surveillance job with Lynch. Two months of sitting in cars, vans and cold apartments while we stared at a house in Jersey. Any chance he got, Lynch would pair himself with me. It was his op, and I was the least experienced so I thought he was showing me the ropes. You know, keeping a close eye on the rookie in case I messed up.”

  I nodded, but said nothing for fear of interrupting her story.

  “One night we were alone in the apartment when he made a pass at me. I made it clear I wasn’t interested in anyone in the Bureau. He didn’t take no for an answer. He grabbed me. Pinned me against the wall. It wasn’t a good night.”

  “God, what happened? Did you report him?”

  She checked her rear view mirror and took two deep breaths. It was almost as if she was steeling herself to look into her past.

  “No, I didn’t report him. I pushed him off me and I got out of there, fast as I could. I didn’t know what to do at first. Talked to Washington about it. He had my back. Always has. We argued about it. Joe is like a solid granite statue of everything that’s good about the Bureau. He spent two days trying to convince me to make a complaint, but I knew it was Lynch’s word against mine. So I said nothing. Because I was going to say nothing, I then had to spend an hour talking Joe out of breaking Lynch’s neck.

  “The surveillance job turned into a bust the next week. My first arrest. We were expecting to find a cache of weapons in the house. Turns out all we got was an old .38 that belonged to the perp’s late mother. He didn’t have a license for it, so I busted him anyway.”

  Her voice slowed, and became clearer. I heard the crackle of leather on the steering wheel as she tightened her grip.

  “Ever since that night, when Lynch and I worked together he’s tried to pin something on me. He wants to ruin my credibility in case I ever do make a complaint. It’s too late now. It’s been eight years. I thought he would’ve let it go, but no. Twice now he’s kicked me off an op because of an alleged compla
int that never actually materialized.”

  “Like at Howell’s house, the night of the fire. He said there’d been a complaint about you assaulting me.”

  “Exactly. It’s bullshit.”

  “So one reason why you’re helping me is that you think Howell is innocent, and the other reason is you want to get one over on Lynch?”

  “It would be nice to prove him wrong, but that’s not the real reason. The guy I busted on my first arrest for possession of his mom’s .38, the guy who didn’t even know there was a gun in the house, well he didn’t make bail. Hung himself in prison six months later. That’s on me. I could see it on his face when I showed him the gun: he didn’t know it was even in the house. I still busted him, and it cost him his life. No way am I letting anyone else go down for something they didn’t do. Not on my watch. I can’t allow it. To be honest, it’s maybe for selfish reasons because I’m not sure I could live through that again. No way. I would just quit.”

  I turned my attention away from Harper and watched the road ahead.

  “You won’t quit,” I said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  It was obvious. Harper was five foot nothing, female, and tough as anyone I’d ever met. And here she was, at the frontline of the FBI still calling out her boss when he made the wrong decision without any fear of the consequences.

  “You don’t know how to quit,” I said.

  A warmth spread over her face. She sat up a little in the driver’s seat and said, “Okay, my turn. I have a question for you about Dallas Birch and your cross about the sign over the mess hall at Quantico.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I trained at the Academy, I ate at that dining hall damn near every day and I don’t remember a sign above the door. So what does it say?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I don’t even know if there is a sign. Until you mentioned it just now, I wasn’t even sure there was a dining hall.”