Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  Mac was surprised to find that, before law school, Stephen Maguire had in fact received his bachelor’s in political science from The Ohio State University. He swore that someone had told him that Maguire had received his bachelor’s from Oxford University.

  Mac was still scratching his head over that when David gave him the run-down. “Maguire was nowhere near in debt. On the contrary. He’d made some good investments and had substantial money in various accounts. He’s made large deposits. He’s got a condo in Hilton Head and a boat. He’s got a Hummer and BMW, all registered in his name. According to Christine’s credit report, the lease for the Beemer is in her name.”

  “He’s got the car; she’s got the payment book. Sweet,” Mac noted with sarcasm.

  “His most recent investment was some commercial property right here on Deep Creek Lake.”

  Mac felt his blood pressure jump up a notch. “Here?”

  “Sully’s over on the other side of the lake,” David explained. “The perfect establishment for lakeside dining.”

  Mac knew the property. Sully’s had been a lakeside restaurant and lounge. The outdoor patio was adjacent to boat docks that allowed customers to dock their boats and jet skis in order to relax for dinner or a cocktail before going back out onto the water. Mac and Archie had eaten there once be-fore it was foreclosed on and the property put up for sale.

  It was located directly across the lake from Spencer Point.

  “How would you feel about Stephen Maguire, the man your wife traded you up for, opening a restaurant and watering hole directly across the lake from you?” David asked. “You’d see his place first thing in the morning when you got up and his joint would be the last thing you’d see before going to bed at night.”

  “I had no idea Maguire was moving out here,” Mac argued. “Why would he? He was on the fast track with the prosecutor’s office when I left Georgetown.”

  “Don’t worry. I believe you,” David said in a calm voice. “It was a surprise to me, too. I knew the bank had sold the property. I didn’t know who to.” Without exerting any effort to conceal the information from Mac, he studied the reports in his file.

  From across the table, Mac read upside down the list of known addresses for Stephen Maguire. He had moved many times over the course of the last several years.

  “Maguire was well to do, but his finances don’t look like what you’d expect of someone descended from billionaires and millionaires,” David said. “He had money. He was worth about one and a half million, but from what I see in their credit reports, that’s because they were living off Christine’s money while he was socking his away.”

  “His grandfather was Broderick Maguire,” Mac argued.

  “Who were his parents?” David asked.

  Mac’s mind went blank. As he thought back over the years that Stephen Maguire had been in his life, he realized he had never asked, and was never told, who Maguire’s parents were. He didn’t care. He was only reminded when he felt like decking Maguire that he was a member of D.C.’s unofficial royal family.

  David recalled some friends who came from affluent families who weren’t allowed free access to their parents’ fortunes. “There’re many wealthy families that insist their kids earn their own way. They want to teach them the value of a dollar.”

  He went on to tell of two brothers with whom he had at-tended school who became drug dealers when their parents insisted they earn their own money.

  “Think about it,” David said. “Their parents made their fortune before they had these kids. All they saw was Mom and Dad hobnobbing with the rich and making business deals over cocktails or while playing golf. Then, they’re told that they need to learn how to work hard. Thing is, all they knew how to do was use their charm to make big money. Working hard was a foreign concept to them. Now these two guys I knew are spending life in prison for two murders instead of hitting golf balls at the Inn.” He suggested, “Maybe that’s what happened with Stephen Maguire.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel sorry for him?” Mac gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw hurt. “From what you’re telling me, Stephen Maguire worked hard and earned his own way by living off his mistresses.”

  “One of the oldest games in the book,” David explained. “I believe the name for men like Maguire is gigolo. Then once the money runs out,” he tapped his copy of the credit re-port on Christine, “like it did for your ex-wife, he moves on to a fresher target. Kind of like one of those vampires you were watching with Gnarly the other night.”

  “After I moved out, they went on cruises,” Mac recalled. “They spent last New Year’s Eve in Paris.” A quick check of the report confirmed that Christine had paid for the trip via a credit card. “I thought at the time that it was Maguire’s money they were spending.” He glanced down at Christine’s credit report. Her rating had fallen like a boulder in two short years. He shoved the report across the table so hard that it flew over the police chief’s shoulder. “Bastard!”

  David reminded him, “That bastard was staying in your inn the night he was killed.”

  “I didn’t know he was there until Christine attacked him while I was checking her in.”

  David leaned across the table toward him. “Why did you take her there? The manor has seven bedrooms. Why didn’t you let her stay there with you?”

  “Because I didn’t want her to stay there with me,” Mac argued. “You saw her. Christine wanted to reconcile and I didn’t. If I had let her spend the night, especially in the frame of mind she was in, it would have given her some glimmer of hope that I’d take her back and I didn’t want her to have that hope.”

  David asked, “And you had no idea that Stephen Maguire was going to be at the Inn at the same time?”

  “I know it sounds like a very big coincidence, but that’s what it was. Anything other than that, I’m unaware of.” Mac thought about how many times suspects had said those exact same words to him and he didn’t believe them.

  David referred to his notes. “Jeff told me that this isn’t the first time Stephen Maguire has stayed at the Inn.”

  “With Christine?” Mac wondered if his ex-wife had come to the manor intending for him to take her to the Inn in order to make Maguire jealous.

  “No,” David answered. “Jeff swears he’d never seen her there before. But he could be mistaken. The Inn has thou-sands upon thousands of guests a year. However, he’s positive that Maguire has never been at the Inn with Christine.” He tapped a page of his notes with the tip of his pen. “Jeff told me that Maguire came to the Inn regularly. Always during ski season. Always with different women. He always booked a deluxe suite with a view of the lake.”

  “It’s not ski season yet.” Mac leaned across the table to decipher the upside-down words in the police chief’s notes.

  “What’s different about this visit is that Maguire booked a basic suite at the last minute during the height of the leaf peeper season. He was willing to take whatever he could get.” David added, “He also came alone.”

  Mac recalled, “There was a woman with him the after-noon before the murders. Maybe she’s local and he met her here. Any ID on the woman?”

  “Not yet,” David said. “My officers are showing her picture from the security cameras around the Inn to see if anyone knows her. No evidence in the room suggests that he had someone staying with him. Forensics did find vaginal fluid on his sheets and are working up a DNA profile on her. Could be the same woman you saw him with. The desk clerk says he was alone when he checked in and paid with a federal credit card. Any idea what case he may have been working on?”

  Mac shook his head. “I left the police department five months ago.”

  “What about cases that were still open when you left?” David suggested.

  “They were all passed on to other investigators.”

  “How about cases that hadn’t gone to trial yet?”

  “There were a couple, but Maguire wasn’t the prosecutor on record for those cases,�
�� Mac said. “I wasn’t the only homicide detective in Georgetown. He could’ve been working on another detective’s case.”

  “I don’t think so,” David said. “I think Maguire was on a business trip and I think it was one of your cases.” He removed the yellow notepad from where it had been hiding under the accordion folder and slid it across the table to land in front of Mac. “This was found in Maguire’s room next to this folder.”

  At the top of the notepad on the first line, in block capital letters, was the word THEMIS.

  The lines below read:

  VM. Emma Wilkes: RE: Dylan Booth

  # Cases. How far back?

  Two lines below that note was the notation that Mac sensed had captured the police chief’s interest: Call M. Faraday?

  “What’s Themis?” David asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mac told him. “Emma Wilkes might be the woman we saw Maguire with. She may also be the one who slipped between his sheets.”

  David said, “The same thought occurred to me. Jeff says there’s no one registered at the Inn by that name. What about Dylan Booth?”

  “Dylan Booth was one of my cases.”

  David sat back in his seat and pressed his palms and fingertips against each other. “Tell me about him.”

  “A law clerk I accused Maguire of killing,” Mac said. “This was before he slept with my wife.”

  “What interest would Maguire have in a law clerk?”

  Mac told him, “I had no doubt in my mind but that Maguire was capable of murder and the evidence made him a suspect.”

  “Do you mean like the other man being found dead in your private suite?” David asked.

  “Touché,” Mac replied. “I was certain Maguire was involved in something dirty having to do with this clerk, but I couldn’t place him at the crime scene. Plus, I came up blank finding out what that dirty deal was. I came up with nothing.”

  While David sipped his cold coffee, Mac went on. “Dylan Booth worked for Judge Randolph Daniels, one of the most influential judges in D.C. He was in his last year of law school. One Saturday someone shot him in the parking lot when he was leaving his office. On the surface, it looked like a robbery. His watch and wallet were missing.”

  “Why do you think it wasn’t?”

  “The security guard at the building said that when Booth left he was carrying a folder box and that it was heavy. That was missing along with Booth’s laptop.”

  “What was in the box? Case files?” David drew his attention to the note on Maguire’s notepad about the number of cases.

  “We assume so. Neither the laptop or box have ever been located.”

  “Why would someone steal case files unless there was something incriminating in them?” David wondered. “Did you ask the judge’s staff if anything was missing from their records?”

  “I’d been a detective for a very long time,” Mac reminded him with a grin. “The staff said nothing was missing.”

  “Maybe the judge—”

  “Would you believe the judge had committed suicide the night before?”

  “Really?” The expression on David’s face was one of instant suspicion.

  Mac cleared that thought from his mind. “Judge Daniels was eighty-four years old. His doctor diagnosed him with brain cancer. He went home and said nothing. That night, after his wife went to bed, he went down to his study and blew his brains out with a Colt revolver.”

  “Any possibility of—”

  “Nope,” Mac interrupted. “He left a suicide note saying that he’d rather go out with a bang than chemo. Everyone who knew him said that was his style. There was absolutely no connection.”

  “If it weren’t for this note, I’d think Booth went to the office to clean out his stuff because he knew that he was out of a job with no judge to clerk to. The box had his desk stuff in it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mac argued. “Stephen Maguire was the last person Booth spoke to minutes before someone blew his brains out. He claimed Booth called him to ask for a recommendation for his application to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  “But you didn’t believe that,” David said.

  “It was Saturday afternoon. People don’t call lawyers’ offices for job interviews on Saturdays. We never found any other suspects and the case went cold. It always bugged me. Maybe because I knew in my gut that Maguire was involved and got away with it.” He looked down at the notepad resting between his hands. “This proves I was right.”

  “Or wrong,” David said. “Maguire made that note to call you unless there’s another M. Faraday you think he knows.

  At least he was thinking about calling you. Maybe he found evidence to prove that he wasn’t involved and wanted to call you to tell you who was.”

  Mac concluded, “And that someone killed him and Christine.”

  Chapter Six

  “Are you going to show me what’s in there?” Mac asked about the accordion folder that had been taunting him during the interview with the police chief.

  “Since Maguire made a note to call you, maybe you can shed some light on it.” David shoved the folder across the table in his direction.

  Mac studied the front of the folder. One word was written in thick black marker with block lettering across the front: THEMIS.

  “Could Themis be the name of a victim from one of your cases?” David asked him. “You said that you’ve investigated well over a hundred murders.”

  “I never forget the name of a victim,” Mac said. “When you take on the responsibility of finding out who killed some-one, you’ll never forget their name or their face.” He shook his head. “I’ve never run into the name Themis.”

  He opened the folder sealed shut with a rubber band. Inside, a single sheet of paper rested on top of four files.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked David.

  “On the table next to the window in his suite,” he replied. “We found a mini-laptop, his cell phone, pen, and his car keys next to the notepad. It looked like he’d been working on something when he finally decided to answer Christine’s calls and went up to the penthouse to get killed.”

  A list of names was written out in long hand. Freddie Gibbons. Sid Baxter. Jillian Keating. Leo Samuels. Gerald Hogan. Douglas Propst.

  Mac turned the paper around so he could read it. “It’s a list of killers. Most of these cases I’ve worked on.”

  He tapped the fourth name with his finger. “I arrested Leo Samuels. He was a pimp and drug dealer on his way up. Got some kid to kill a girl he’d snatched from Union Station who refused to go to work for him, even after he’d raped her and beat her to a pulp. The kid rolled on Samuels, then got knifed in jail before the trial. The guy was a monster. Not an ounce of remorse.”

  Seeing that the case still got under Mac’s skin, David said, “I take it by the look on your face that he got off.”

  “His lawyer got everything suppressed since the kid wasn’t alive to testify. According to everything that I got on Samuels, it wasn’t the first time. He knew the way the system worked inside and out. The guy was smarter than some lawyers I know.” He sighed. “But for all his smarts it didn’t do him any good. Less than six months later he was dead and another gang member took his place in the hierarchy.”

  David said, “Sometimes I wonder why we bother wasting our time.”

  Studying the label on the top file, Mac opened the cover and read the first sheet of paper. It was a letter. “Look at this.” He held it out to David.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a letter from the police in Paris.” Mac explained the contents. “It says that according to the results of a DNA test made at Maguire’s request, they have positively identified a John Doe found in a hostel in Paris as Frederick Gibbons Junior.”

  David spun the folder around to view the discovery. “Isn’t that the rapist and killer that skipped the country less than an hour after the grand jury indicted him? The one that Maguire blamed on you for letting him escape? He�
��s dead?”

  Retrieving the report taken from him, Mac flipped the cover letter to study the sheet underneath. “This letter is from a private investigator hired by Gibbons’s father to look for him.”

  “Didn’t Gibbons fly out on his father’s jet?”

  Mac was still reading the private investigator’s report. “A couple of months after they’d helped their son to escape, he disappeared. Their private investigator found an American John Doe matching Freddie’s description murdered execution style around the time he stopped communicating with his parents.”

  “What would this have to do with Stephen Maguire’s murder?”

  “Gibbons was killed only a couple of months after he got away,” Mac said slowly. “Maybe it was payback. Everyone on the inside knows Maguire was behind Gibbons’s escape. It turns out Frederick Gibbons, Senior, and Maguire were friends. They used to be roommates in law school.”

  David almost spit out his coffee. “And Maguire didn’t remove himself from the case?”

  The police chief’s shock amused Mac, who had seen more incidents of unfair politics played out in the justice system than he cared to remember. “If Maguire had done that, then he couldn’t have stalled and blocked me as much as he did to keep Gibbons from getting arrested. It was only because I went over his head with the evidence I had against Freddie Gibbons Junior that Maguire finally took it to the grand jury. When they voted to indict, Maguire got word to Gibbons Senior to get his son out of the country. I missed him by less than an hour.”

  Mac shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, Maguire was so slick that it’s yet another one of those things where everyone knows he did it, but no one could get enough proof to arrest or convict him of anything.”

  “But, if everyone knows he did it, why didn’t his boss fire him?” David asked.

  Chuckling, Mac said, “He was a Maguire. That’s why. You really don’t know anything about politics.” He turned his attention back to Gibbons’s fate. “Maybe the killer decided not to stop with Freddie, but the crooked prosecutor that let him escape.”