“Agreed. My people will handle the hostages; you handle the family and the Paul Grey disappearance. Tomorrow morning at oh-eight-hundred everyone on the task force will meet at SAPD to debrief and for follow-ups. Agreed?”
“Thanks, Jordan. I appreciate it.”
Young put his hand on Leo’s shoulder. “I meant what I said, Leo. You did everything you could to save that guy. I’m sorry it went south.”
Leo nodded at his friend, and when Young left, Leo hit the side of the truck. “Lucy, find out about the autopsy. You have a good rapport with the ME’s office, right?”
“Yes, Julie’s a friend.” As much as the prickly Julie Peters could be a friend to anyone. She was the deputy medical examiner.
“She’s good, right?”
“The best.”
“Okay—see if you can get her on it. Something was going on physically with that guy. Maybe mental, but a good ME can see that in the brain, right?”
“Possibly—they should be able to identify a tumor, or chemical imbalance.”
“I asked Mrs. McMahon’s brother to call me when she’s ready to talk, and I’d like you to sit in. You’re a psychologist, you might pick up on something that I don’t. So be ready.”
Lucy left Leo and Yancey at the tactical truck and walked over to where the hostages were being interviewed in a restaurant. Jason Lopez was talking to two teenage girls, but when he saw Lucy he wrapped up the conversation and approached her.
“Clusterfuck,” he muttered.
“Did you expect anything else?”
“Those two girls—Cindy Oberman and April Forsyth—they’re fifteen. Both were supposed to be in summer school today for flunking geometry, but ditched. Don’t think they’ll do that again. Anyway, they were sitting at the table next to McMahon and each had a different statement.”
“You took them separately or together?”
“Together—Mancini said not to split them up because they were scared and we didn’t want to further terrorize them. They’re minors, their parents have been called, but that was a situation in and of itself. Both with divorced parents, everyone works, no one can get here for an hour, a lot of family stress. I’m going to follow up again with them tomorrow, though, because it doesn’t make sense.”
“What specifically did they disagree about?”
“Cindy—the blonde—said McMahon was talking to himself, she thought he was a homeless guy who panhandled enough for coffee. ‘Off his meds,’ she said. April, the brunette, said he was clearly not homeless, his clothes were too clean.”
“Observant.”
“Yeah, except she insisted that he wasn’t talking to himself, he was having a conversation with someone else. Which doesn’t make sense because no other witness said he was talking to anyone, but several said he was muttering to himself.”
“Who?”
“She didn’t see his face. A guy was looking at a display, but she said he was listening to McMahon and said something to him, but she couldn’t hear what.”
“Get a description?”
“Nope. Just a guy in a suit, old like her dad.”
“How old is her dad?”
“Forty-six. But I’ve interviewed enough teenagers to know that he could be anywhere from thirty to sixty.”
“But he would have to be in there, right?” She gestured toward the witness staging area.
“I asked her to point him out, and she said he wasn’t here.”
“Have any of the hostages been released?”
“Yes, but at the time I was talking to the girls, only the mother with her kids had been released. Mancini talked to her, she wasn’t much help.” He flipped through his notes. “We have identified eight individuals who fled prior to the doors being locked. Names, numbers, et cetera. He could have left with them; maybe he went to the police station or his car. We’ll track him down.”
“Are there security cameras in there?”
“Nope. But SAPD is canvassing the businesses in the area. Some have security feeds, we should be able to put together a series of events. If the guy left we’ll find him.”
Tia Mancini motioned for Jason, and he said to Lucy, “We’ll be here all day, so I probably won’t see you until the morning briefing. And thank Sean again for the Fourth of July barbecue. My son had a blast with Jesse.”
“We were glad you could make it.”
“Bobbie said when she gets the house in order, she’ll reciprocate. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have my family finally here.”
“Family is why we do all this,” Lucy said. “I enjoyed meeting Bobbie and the kids.”
When Jason transferred from Phoenix to San Antonio six months ago, his wife didn’t want to take the kids out of school in the middle of the year, plus they needed to sell their house. It had been hard on them, and while Lucy’s initial working relationship with Jason had been strained, they’d developed a mutual respect. Sean hooked Jason up with a terrific real estate agent who helped make the relocation easier for the Lopez family. Bobbie and his two kids moved a month ago.
The barbecue on Saturday had been an easy way to introduce Sean’s son Jesse to their friends. Most people didn’t know Sean had a thirteen-year-old son—Sean himself hadn’t known about Jesse until last year. Their relationship was short-lived because Jesse, his mother, and his stepfather had been put into witness protection, but a recent threat assessment indicated that the danger was low because those threatening the Spade family were dead. Jesse’s mother agreed that Sean could have visitation rights, and Jesse was spending most of the summer in San Antonio.
Jason headed over to regroup with Tia Mancini, and Lucy went back outside. She saw the coroner’s van and looked around for which deputy coroner was scheduled. She was pleased to see Julie Peters.
She approached and said, “I’m glad you’re the one taking lead on this.”
“You want in?”
“I have a debriefing at eight, what time will you start?”
“Don’t know yet—I have to move some bodies around, but SAPD says this is a priority. Sometime tomorrow morning. And I know what you need—full tox, complete autopsy. No stone unturned, yada yada. I’ll put in a call to the hot doc.”
“Excuse me?”
Julie grinned. “Dr. Dominic Moreno. Even his name is sexy.”
“And he is what? An ME?”
“No, a brain surgeon. Literally—he’s a neurosurgeon. He works out of the university medical center, transferred at the beginning of the year from Johns Hopkins to head up the department here. He’s absolutely the finest specimen of male anatomy I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Ask him out.”
“I did. He’s gay.”
Lucy laughed, then quickly covered her mouth. Not appropriate here.
“But he’s so nice to look at, I really don’t care. And brilliant. He’s assisted me a couple of times when I found a brain anomaly, and since it’s a research hospital, he’s more than happy to help. I’ll give him a heads-up and ask for an assist.”
“If he does, I’ll shoot him the audio files of Proctor’s conversation with McMahon. It might help, from a neurological standpoint.”
“I’ll let you know either way. I’m outta here. It’s too friggin’ hot to stand around, and the body is only going to get riper. Sorry I couldn’t make the party at your place this weekend. Truly, I thought about it, but people—living people, that is—make me break out in hives. I’m just not much for large groups.”
Lucy could relate. While she didn’t dislike groups—growing up as the youngest of seven kids, she couldn’t avoid them—she was always exhausted after a big event like the party. She’d slept in on Sunday and then was lazy for the rest of the day—a rarity for her.
“Sometime you’ll have to come over, just you, me, and Sean.”
“That I’d enjoy,” she said with a sincere grin and secured the back of the van, then she and her assistant climbed into the cab and drove off.
Lucy spotted Nat
e Dunning, her friend and colleague, leaning against the FBI tactical van. He looked angry—and for Nate, that was saying something. He rarely showed emotion.
She walked over to Nate. “How are you?”
“I did the job, Luce.”
“I know.”
“Be my friend, not my shrink.”
“I am.”
“Mandatory leave is bullshit.”
“Agreed.” Most of the time. “You took the shot on orders, because you had to. I get it. It’s only three days,” she reminded him.
“I need to be in the field. I’m worried about Leo and want to be part of his team, but I’m going to be sitting around doing shit and talking to fucking shrinks.”
“I’m on the task force, Nate. I’ll keep an eye on him. I listened to every word of their conversation. Leo did everything he could to end this without gunfire. Something was going on with McMahon. I’m hopeful that the autopsy will give us answers.”
“We couldn’t have done anything different,” Nate said.
“I agree. And if you need me—as a friend, either me or Sean—we’re here for you.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. “Thanks, Luce.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Yancey and one of the SAPD tech guys had collected all the raw security footage from every building in the area to create a viable time line for each hostage entering the facility, when McMahon arrived, and people who left after he arrived, up until he had the doors locked. Some of the images were clear, others fuzzy, depending on the quality of the security camera and where it was focused.
She watched over Yancey’s shoulder as they fed the data into a program that would clean it up as much as possible. Unfortunately, some of the feeds were so bad they wouldn’t be useful.
“This is going to take time,” Yancey said.
She knew that, but she was always interested in the process.
Fortunately, Leo popped his head into the back of the tactical truck. “Lucy, Lisa McMahon and her brother are ready to talk.”
Lucy walked with Leo halfway down the block to a real estate office that had opened its conference rooms to law enforcement for interviews. Most of the witnesses were at the restaurant, but this afforded more privacy for Charlie McMahon’s widow.
Lisa and her brother, Deputy Trevor Olsen, sat close together on one side of a table that could sit eight. Lucy and Leo introduced themselves and sat across from them.
“I think I can hold it together,” Lisa said. She tightly held her brother’s hand. “My sister-in-law has the kids, I just talked to them. They’d already heard on the news—not that it was their father, but what happened.” Tears leaked out and Trevor handed her another tissue to go with the stack of used tissues next to her.
“We won’t keep you long,” Leo said. “I know you want to be with your family. But it’s important to get your immediate thoughts, and then Agent Kincaid and I will follow up in a day or two to see if you remember anything else. I was the one talking to your husband, trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution. I’m really sorry I couldn’t convince him to put down his guns.”
“None of this makes sense to me. This isn’t Charlie. It just isn’t.”
“When we talked earlier, you said you left him in April and shortly thereafter he lost his job. You said he’d changed, had become belligerent and violent.”
“Not violent—he never hit me or the kids. He just—he wasn’t himself. He yelled, was short-tempered, complained that he had a headache—I thought he might have migraines, wanted him to see the doctor, but he said it wasn’t a migraine. He stopped talking to me about his work, about the kids, he was so … distant, I guess I’d say, when he was home.”
“When did this start? April?”
“Early March, but it wasn’t too bad. It was shortly after Easter—that was the first week of April—when I really noticed that something was wrong.”
Trevor spoke up for the first time. “We were all over at Lisa’s house for a meal. Charlie isn’t close to his family, and it’s just Lisa and me and her kids and my wife and our daughter. Lisa and I have always been close. Charlie didn’t talk. He stared at a baseball game—he doesn’t even like sports—and then went to bed before dinner. No explanation.”
“I went upstairs to talk to him,” Lisa said, “and he was sitting on the bed staring at the wall. He said he wasn’t feeling well, but I knew it was something else. I didn’t push then, told everyone he had a bug, but he just never got better. He would get up before me and go to work, and usually didn’t get home until after midnight. I don’t think he was sleeping much. When I tried to talk to him, he would snap at me. He was moody, but it was like a perpetual bad mood that sometimes was worse.”
“What happened that led you to leave?”
“I gave him an ultimatum. That he tell me what was going on, why he was acting this way, or I was leaving. He yelled at me. I thought he was going to hit me—he didn’t—but I had never seen him so angry. And he wasn’t angry at me. He was angry at himself. He said he lost something important, began to tear the house apart and couldn’t find it, but he wouldn’t tell me what he’d lost. I said I’d help him find it, but he just … well, he’d cut me out of everything for weeks before this, but this was completely different and he scared me. I left with the kids.”
“Have you seen him since?” Leo asked. “Talked to him?”
“At first, no—I didn’t want to talk to him. But Trevor convinced me to go see him. We both went over to the house.”
She glanced at her brother. He squeezed her hand in support.
“I mediated between them,” Trevor said. He wasn’t as emotional as his sister, he was doing his best to keep his cop face, but his eyes were rimmed in red and he was holding back his conflicted feelings. “We sat down and tried to work through what was going on. Lisa loves Charlie—I love Charlie. My daughter, she’s only six, worshipped him. He was so great with kids. We came up with a plan to have Charlie for dinner, to figure out what was going on, and he thought he might need to see a doctor because he was having lapses in memory. At the time, he seemed remorseful, like he really wanted to figure out why he was having mood swings and forgetfulness. But he said he didn’t want Lisa to move back, not until he figured out what was wrong.”
“I was so hopeful,” Lisa said. “I told him I wanted to come back, and I would be right there with him, no matter what it was. Then everything changed a week later—the first week of May. He was fired. I saw him after, reminded him that he was going to see his doctor, and he told me it was a trap. That made no sense. Then he said he couldn’t see me or the kids, told me to stay away from him. And I … I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was staying in the house, but I started getting late notices and realized he wasn’t paying the bills. I took over all the bills then. Once, at the end of May, I went to the house, and there was rotting food in the refrigerator and I wondered—feared—that he was dead. I called his cell phone and it had been disconnected. I called Paul, and Paul said he’d track him down and find out what was going on.”
“Paul Grey? You said he was a friend?”
She nodded. “Charlie and Paul were friends from college. They’d worked on a major research project together in grad school. They kept in touch, and when Clarke-Harrison expanded, Charlie brought Paul on and Paul and his family relocated from Los Angeles.”
“What did they do for CHR?” Leo asked.
“Charlie is a neurologist, Paul a biochemist. They worked on Alzheimer’s research. Did I hear that Paul is missing?”
“His wife filed a missing persons report yesterday,” Leo said. “Were you aware that your husband was arrested for assault a week or two ago? He was released on bail. He assaulted Paul, but it was the bartender who pressed charges.”
It was clear Lisa knew nothing about it. But Trevor did.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” he said to his sister.
She looked confused. “Why would Charlie hit Paul? They were friends. Colleag
ues. It doesn’t make sense!”
“That’s what we want to find out,” Leo said. “What else do you know about your husband’s work?”
“Not much. Charlie has been involved in Alzheimer’s research most of his career. He believed that in his lifetime he would find a cure. His grandmother was diagnosed when he was a teenager, she lived with his family until she died. It was really rough on everyone, especially the last couple of years. The only person in his family Charlie was close to was his grandmother, and then to lose her like that … Charlie wanted to make a difference—he has made a difference.” Her voice trailed off and she looked away, her face clouded.
“Lisa,” Lucy said quietly, “I know this is difficult for you. You need to focus on who your husband was, remind your children who he was before all this happened. But right now, we want to help you find answers, and the only way we can do that is to figure out what changed in March. Was he working on anything specific?”
“I wouldn’t know. He used to talk to me about his work, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying. I listened because he was excited. Until he just stopped talking about anything.”
“Do you know why he was fired?” Leo asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me. I asked Paul … he said he couldn’t tell me because of a nondisclosure statement he’d signed. I got so mad at him—this is Charlie, his friend. I was so worried about Charlie—and mad. Mad at my husband because I didn’t understand.”
“There’s no record of your husband having any history of mental illness?” Leo asked.
“None. Charlie has always been the most even-tempered person I know,” Lisa said. “In fact, until April he never raised his voice, we never went to bed angry with each other, and we were happy. And now—my husband is dead, everyone thinks he’s a bad person. And he wasn’t. I want to know why this all happened.”
“So do we, Mrs. McMahon,” Leo said.
* * *
When Lisa and Trevor left, Leo and Lucy sat in the conference room. “Do you know anything about Clarke-Harrison Research?” Leo asked.
Too Far Gone Page 4
