Backfire fst-16

by Catherine Coulter

  Cindy gave Eve a girl-to-girl smile. “In my experience, guys usually prefer beer.”

  Eve sat back in her chair. “That wasn’t a bad comeback, Cindy, but maybe Clive could give you a cooler line, since he’s smarter. Hmm, I wonder what your folks would think about how you’ve grown up, what you’ve finally done.”

  Cindy Cahill never looked away from Eve’s face. “Since dear old Dad started coming to my bedroom when I was eleven years old, I don’t think he’d care one way or the other.”

  Interesting, Savich thought. Did the shrinks know she’d been abused? He started to rein it back, since he didn’t want the Cahills to demand their lawyer, but he wanted to see what Eve would say next. He gave her a small nod.

  Eve said, “Clive, if it wasn’t you running the show, what were you doing, anyway? Did Cindy have you fetch her coffee, slide her slippers on her dainty feet, make up her schedule of seduction for her?”

  Clive was shaking his head, looking from his wife to Savich, then finally back at Eve.

  Eve continued. “Then what is she doing with you, Clive? You’re nearly old enough to be her father, aren’t you, nearly as old as her father who abused her? Tell me the truth, now, Clive, I know it must be tucked in the back of your brain. You’re afraid of her, aren’t you? Afraid she’ll tire of you, afraid she’ll start seeing a guy who’s younger than you? Afraid she’ll take her chances and talk to us, leave you here by yourself on death row?”

  Clive’s pale face turned red. He yelled, heaving, he was so mad, “I am not afraid of her! She’s my wife. She’d never do anything to hurt me! I’m the one who found her, who taught her everything—”

  “Did you teach her how to kill? Probably not, since the scene at that murder was a mess, not well done of you at all. Poison doesn’t always make a person just fall over and die. No, Mark Lindy fought when he realized what you’d done to him. He tried to take you down, but the poison got to him first, and it wasn’t at all pretty, was it, Cindy? And that, Clive, led the police to both of you.”

  Cindy Cahill squeezed Clive’s hand hard. “Don’t you get all bent out of shape about anything, Clive. She’s only trying to play you.” She shook her head at them. “Aren’t you two the cool team? How long have you worked this routine together? Have you ever had any luck with it?”

  Eve sat forward now, clasped her hands in front of her. “Do you know, Cindy, one thing I’d never do is kill someone by poison. It’s so—mean-spirited, cowardly, really, you know what I mean? And it’s so tacky. So low-class. Give me a knife any day and let me face down the person I’m going to kill.”

  “I am not tacky!”

  “No? Then what do you call using your body whenever Clive wants you to? Without the money, without the trappings, who would think you’re worth any more than a fast in and out with a streetwalker against a wall in an alley?”

  “You bitch! I’m not a whore. Sue thinks I’m perfect!”

  Sue? Who is Sue? What is this?

  Savich broke in, hard and fast. “And Sue is walking around outside in the sunshine while you two are on the road to a lethal injection. Was it Sue who tried to kill Judge Hunt?”

  Cindy and Clive Cahill looked at each other again and pulled it together. Cindy studied her fingernails and sounded bored. “There is no Sue, it’s a name I made up. As for Judge Hunt getting shot, I don’t know any more than anyone else who saw the news on TV. I have no idea who shot him.”

  Eve said, “Come on, game’s up, Cindy. Did Sue shoot Judge Hunt?”

  “I’ll tell you again—there is no Sue,” Cindy said. “There wasn’t even a reason for us to shoot the judge, was there?”

  Savich said, “Are you so unimportant, Cindy, that Sue didn’t even tell you why she wanted Judge Hunt dead?”

  “There is no Sue,” Cindy said yet again, calm as a stone now. “Like I already told you morons, why would we want the frigging judge dead? There’s no payoff for us, you said so yourself. Me, I was sort of sorry to hear it. Judge Hunt was hot, the way he looked at me—” Her husband didn’t say a word, only stared at the wall behind Savich’s head. “I bet he doesn’t look so hot now, does he?”

  Eve wanted to leap over the table and punch her out. She forced herself to draw a deep breath instead.

  Savich said, “Did Sue kill the prosecutor like you did Mark Lindy?”

  Clive shrugged. “We don’t know anything about the judge, and we don’t know anything about the prosecutor. How could we? We’re in jail, Agent Savich, not out drinking beer and dancing at clubs.” He sat back in his chair and smirked. “That prosecutor, what a schmuck. O’Rourke would never have proven a case against us.”

  But Cindy was still enraged. “All the accusations—it’s entrapment, nothing more. We didn’t kill anyone—if that ridiculous judge hadn’t stopped the trial, we would have been acquitted! Somebody else shot him—probably someone he put away.” She turned to Clive. “You know what, darling? This has been fun, but we got to put an end to it. Agent Savich, we want our lawyer.”

  Eve wanted to kick herself. She’d been the one to screw it up, to push it too far.

  Savich said as he rose, “I was hoping you two were behind the attempt on Judge Hunt’s life, that you’d hired an assassin to kill him, with the help of your lawyer paying him from some offshore account we haven’t found yet. Now I see that’s impossible.” He flattened his palms on the scarred table. “After spending some time with the two of you, the fact is I don’t think either of you has the brains to pull it off by yourselves.”

  “We could do anything we wanted to,” Clive shouted. “And what we want now is our lawyer!”

  Eve rose and stared down at him, then at Cindy. “Why don’t you tell us about Sue? You really don’t have to take the fall for her, not if she approached you, not if she’s the go-between to sell the material you stole off Mark Lindy’s computer.”

  Neither of them said a word.

  Savich said, “Do you know Mark Lindy always liked to say he wasn’t a wackadoodle, like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. He was more like Leonard, funny and kind?”

  They looked at Savich blankly.

  Savich shrugged. “Mark’s sister Elaine said he readily admitted he was a nerd, and he’d laugh, say he loved Spock as much as the next nerd, but she said Mark knew he saw people more clearly, interacted with them more easily, than most nerds did. But he didn’t see you clearly, did he, Cindy? And it cost him his life.”

  Still no word from either of them.

  How had Savich known that? From the murder file, of course. Eve said, “Did this Sue tell you to poison him, Cindy? Clive? Did she watch you do it?”

  Cindy said, her voice vicious, “There is no Sue, you little dyke.”

  Eve smiled at Cindy, turned to the door, and said over her shoulder, “You could be a model, Cindy, but not for much longer. Not if you stay in here.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a model. What idiot would want to live on yogurt and look like a refugee camp survivor?”

  Federal Building

  450 Golden Gate Avenue

  San Francisco

  Saturday

  Savich and Eve walked into the FBI conference room on the thirteenth floor of the Federal Building a half-hour later, straight-up noon. Half a dozen FBI agents were seated around the long conference table along with Lieutenant Virginia Trolley and Lieutenant Delion of the SFPD, and the U.S. Marshal Carney Maynard. Savich gave a little finger wave to Sherlock and Harry, who were eating pizza out of the same box. Pepperoni, Savich knew; it was Sherlock’s favorite.

  There were stacked pizza boxes, a ton of paper napkins, and cans of soda scattered across the table. SAC Cheney Stone swallowed the last of his Hawaiian pineapple pizza slice and waved to them. “Come on in. Help yourselves, lots of pizza left, and probably still warm. Savich, there’s a couple of slices of veggie pizza for you if this crew hasn’t scarfed them all down. Tell us how you made out with the Cahills.”

  Savich looked over at Marshal Maynard as he s
at down. “Deputy Barbieri did an excellent job, sir, rattled them good. She got Cindy Cahill so angry she spit out a name—Sue. We’re thinking she might be the operative who was the Cahills’ handler.”

  “Sue?” Maynard said. “Sue is a foreign operative?”

  Savich nodded at Eve as he picked up one of the three slices of Veggie Heaven pizza.

  Eve said, “Well, Cindy implied she had a close—maybe an intimate—relationship with her, before she tried to deny that Sue exists.”

  Savich said, “Harry, you’ve been looking for their contact for months, haven’t you?”

  Harry said, “We thought there had to be someone working closely with them. Their backgrounds didn’t fit high-level espionage. They’ve been talented grifters, that’s all, who’ve been busy rolling drunks and using Cindy’s charms to cheat some lonely men out of their money. This was way out of their league.”

  Savich nodded. “So now this Sue is our best bet for the one who made contact with the Cahills, maybe recruited them.”

  Cheney asked, “So this woman might be the shooter? You think the CIA knows about this and they didn’t bother to tell us?”

  “We can ask the CIA if they have a file on her,” Harry said. “But so far the CIA hasn’t even told us what it was the Cahills managed to steal. Only that it was in the area of cyber-security, quote/unquote. Maybe now we have something to trade them.”

  There were smiles around the table.

  Eve said, “We might have gotten more out of them, but their survival instinct kicked in and they backpedaled like crazy and hollered for their lawyer.” She sighed. “It was my fault, I handled it wrong, pushed them too hard.”

  Savich said, “You did good, Eve, lots better than Harry would have done. He’d have scared the crap out of them. This is good pizza, guys.”

  Sherlock, a slice of pepperoni pizza halfway to her mouth, said, “No last name? Only Sue, and Cindy Cahill just spit it out?”

  Eve nodded.

  Harry turned to Eve, his eyes narrowed. “What did you do? Swing your blond ponytail in Cindy’s direction and watch her explode?”

  “Close,” Savich said.

  Harry said, “Maybe she was making up the name Sue, playing you.”

  Eve could see he wasn’t happy about having this sprung on him. He’d worked this case for more than a year, and he’d never gotten a name out of them.

  Deal with it, Harry.

  Eve took a big bite of her pizza slice. “Tell you what, Harry, you can listen to our recording of the interview, make up your own mind. Sorry there’s no video showing my ponytail.”

  Cheney asked, “Harry, your team never came across this name Sue in your investigation?”

  “No, and believe me, our agents”—he nodded to several agents across from him—“we checked through their known associates for months, in and out of jail. Clive Cahill isn’t stupid. He’s always used prepaid cell phones we can’t trace to him, for example. If he was making contact with some foreign corporation or government or intelligence service, whatever, we have no record of it.”

  Ten-year veteran Agent Burt Seng said, “The whole operation was skillfully done until the Cahills screwed up and ended up with a dead body on their hands, and got caught. To get any of the confidential information off Mark Lindy’s encrypted computer, somebody in the operation had to know a good deal about the information security system Lindy used to access the project he was working on. Not just his user IDs and passcodes, but enough about the access algorithms and the project itself to know what was valuable and how to get to it without alerting the security oversight team.”

  Savich said, “It means this Sue was super-careful. She had to pay the Cahills some upfront money, but you haven’t been able to find any stashed funds, right?”

  “Not a dime,” Burt Seng said. “This ‘Sue’ name, though”—he turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith—“you ever hear of a foreign spy with the name Sue?”

  Griffin shook his head. “I’m thinking it’s got to be a code name. Maybe it isn’t even a woman, who knows?”

  Eve said, “Cindy didn’t shout it out like it was a code name. It sounded like she knew this Sue person, and well.”

  Cheney was tapping his pen on the tabletop. “Savich, you agree with Barbieri?”

  Savich said, “Yes.”

  Cheney said, “I’ll call the CIA operations officers who worked on the Cahills’ case, see if they recognize it.”

  Savich said, “I’m thinking I might throw out Sue’s name to Siles, see his reaction, see if he recognizes the name. I told the guard not to let either Clive or Cindy Cahill have any phone calls until after we visit Siles today.”

  Cheney said, “Okay, let’s shift gears for the moment.” He turned to Agent Seng. “Burt has been waiting to give us follow-up on what he and Sherlock found out about that Zodiac Judge Hunt saw.”

  Burt Seng wiped his hands on a napkin, then clicked on the overhead to show a Google map of Sea Cliff. He pointed. “Judge Hunt’s house is there on the point of land. You can see there are big boulders scattered all over the beach. Since Judge Hunt told us about the Zodiac, we can forget about whether the shooter drove down Sea Cliff Avenue, parked his car or motorcycle near China Beach Park, and made his way down to the beach.” Burt grinned. “Man or woman, this Sue came in by water.

  “If you’ve ever been on an inflatable with an outboard motor, you know it’s capable of speed. He could have motored the Zodiac right up to the beach. He didn’t care if Judge Hunt saw the Zodiac, since he planned to kill him. He walked around the ocean side of the bluff and positioned himself in the mess of thick rocks that stud the beach.” He nodded to Sherlock as he put the photo of the Zodiac on the overhead.

  “Now, a female Sue adds a new wrinkle to this,” Sherlock said, “since Mrs. Moe, the owner of Bay Outings in Sausalito, says she rented a Zodiac to a man at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon under the name Bently Ames.”

  Burt said, “Mrs. Moe never questioned it was a man. She described him well. Here’s our sketch.” He projected the drawing on the overhead and passed around a sketch of a man described as five-foot-nine or -ten, on the slender side, wearing loose jeans, sneakers, an oversized blue Windbreaker, dark opaque sunglasses, and a Giants baseball cap.

  “Bently Ames never took off the sunglasses or the cap. He had a flat voice, Mrs. Moe said, no particular regional accent she could identify. He was polite, paid with an AmEx. He needed the Zodiac only one day, wanted to do an evening run on the bay with his girlfriend, who’d grown up on Zodiacs in Hawaii, he told her. She remembered he was wearing a big honker diamond ring on his pinkie finger, could have been fake, she didn’t know, but why would a man wear a fake diamond? Again, Mrs. Moe didn’t question this was a man. She thought he was middle-aged, maybe even older.

  “Now, Bently Ames returned the Zodiac Friday morning right on time. Mrs. Moe said they didn’t even have to wash it down, it was so squeaky clean.”

  Sherlock picked it up. “We had our forensic team scour the Zodiac for any sort of evidence anyway, but like Burt said, Bently Ames was thorough in his cleaning, so we don’t have anything.”

  Burt said, “We’ll show this photo of the Zodiac he or she rented to Judge Hunt, see if he can positively identify it. That’s unlikely, though, since Zodiacs look similar, for the most part.”

  Sherlock said, “We found the real Bently Ames in his Tiburon real estate office. He said his wallet wasn’t missing. We asked him to check. Turns out his wallet was in his pocket, but his AmEx was gone. He said he’d had dinner with his sister at Guymas, a Tiburon restaurant on the water, on Wednesday evening. Then he remembered that after he paid the bill, he’d stopped in the men’s room. He said there were maybe four guys in there using the facilities but for the life of him he couldn’t remember anything unusual. Then he stopped cold, said a guy bumped into him in the small hallway outside the restroom.”

  “Bingo,” Virginia Trolley said. “Was he wearing sunglasses and a ball cap?�
��

  Burt nodded. “Yep, a Giants baseball cap. Again, Mr. Ames described him as a man.

  “Since Sue had to park someplace, we checked the parking lot closest to Guymas first,” Sherlock said. “No luck. We didn’t think he’d use the parking lot next to the Tiburon Theater and take a chance of being seen, but we checked anyway.”

  Sherlock said, “The parking lot attendant in the big lot sits in a booth and takes the money.” She gave a big grin. “Guess what?”

  “He did park there,” Harry said. “And the parking attendant noticed a license plate? Please? Please?”

  “Nope, but this little freckle-faced kid struts out of the booth in his loose low-rider jeans and tells us sure, he remembered the dude, remembered the sunglasses and the baseball cap. Then Freckle-face told us he knew for sure it wasn’t a rental, since it was a butt-ugly old Dodge Charger, with red paint chipping off. Unfortunately, no license plate, but Freckle-face did say it was a California license.”

  Cheney turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith. “Griffin has been coordinating with the highway patrol and the local police departments to try to locate that vehicle. He’s also got more news for us.”

  Sherlock thought Griffin Hammersmith was saved from being too pretty by his nose. It was off-kilter, probably broken when he was a kid. As for his eyes, they were bluer than hers. She wondered if he was used to women trying to chase him down. He said in his slow, melodic voice, “I tried to put myself in the shooter’s shoes. If I came to San Francisco to murder a federal judge, I’d want to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I’d probably want to stay outside the city, unless I had to be there. And I wouldn’t stay anywhere near where I was going to snatch a credit card, like from Bently Ames in Tiburon. So, south of the city, probably near a major highway. A nice enough place but not big or fancy.