Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  Seeing Mac and David behind them, they gasped.

  “Faraday, you look horrible,” the judge said upon seeing Mac’s unkempt appearance. “What happened to you?”

  “I had a head-on collision with an assassin,” Mac said.

  Natasha regained her composure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the one someone sent to my home to retrieve Stephen Maguire’s belongings. She killed a potential witness in Morgantown last night. Today, she tried to take me and guests in my home hostage in exchange for all the evidence collected in the Maguire case. I killed her.” He leaned over the seat toward them. “Now you two have been very anxious to get your hands on his stuff.”

  “Not anxious enough to break the law,” the judge said.

  “All we want is a recording,” Natasha said. “Garrison told you about it. We came clean. Why would we send someone to go after you after admitting what it was we wanted?”

  “I don’t know,” Mac replied. “You tell me.”

  Natasha waved both hands in a gesture of innocence. “Whatever Stephen got into and got killed over, has nothing to do with me. This assassin you’re talking about is something completely different.”

  “Mac,” Garrison said, “you have to believe us. That re-cording might be embarrassing, but it certainly isn’t anything worth sending a renegade cop to kill for it.”

  Chuckling, Mac shook his head as he whispered to them, “I said nothing about her being a renegade cop.”

  The judge’s face turned red.

  Mac turned to the defense attorney. “You’re losing your touch, Natasha. You used to be the best liar in Washington. You slipped up when you said anyone could have slipped that arsenic into Maguire’s champagne. The police never determined what the arsenic had been in. He drank more than champagne that night. He also drank martinis and ate a lot of different foods. But you, for some reason, knew that the arsenic was in his champagne. How is that?”

  For the first time in all the years Mac had known Natasha Holmstead, she was speechless.

  They locked eyes in a stare down, each one daring the other to blink.

  Behind him, Mac heard David speaking in a low tone into his radio.

  The stare down ended with David’s hand on Mac’s arm. “Mac, we’ve got to go.”

  Mac leaned in close to her as if to kiss her on the cheek. Instead, he whispered into her ear. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

  David waited until they were across the lobby and out of earshot of the judge and Natasha before he announced to Mac, “A fisherman found Sanders’s body in the lake.”

  * * * *

  “He’s been in the water for about twenty-four hours,” the medical examiner announced from where he was still examining Hamilton Sanders’s body on the dock behind the lakeside restaurant and lounge formerly known as Sully’s.

  Since the business had been shut down, with no one to care for the establishment, fallen leaves had blown across the dock to fill up crevices and corners and behind the steps that led down from the parking lot along the side of the building.

  Between the sun setting behind the mountains, the long shadows of the trees along the shore, the chill in the air, and the rustic décor of the abandoned outdoor cafe on the dock, the crime scene took on an eerie atmosphere.

  “That’s why he didn’t go back to his hotel.” David asked the medical examiner, “Have you come up with a COD?”

  She showed them Sanders’s bare stomach where she had opened his button-down shirt. Three stab wounds were visible above his navel and below his ribs. “He was stabbed before he went into the water.”

  Mac searched around on the dock until he found a brown stain, which he pointed out to David. “Could be blood.”

  David stepped closer to the back door of the restaurant. “Here’s another one.”

  Like following bread crumbs in the woods, they followed drop after drop until they arrived at the back door.

  “Do you think?” David laid his hand, encased in an evidence glove, on the door lever. When he pressed down, the door opened. It had been unlocked.

  They stepped inside the darkened room that had only months before been a lakeside bar and game room. Two pool tables rested in the middle of the floor. Tables with chairs, some on top of the tables, others stacked, still others in their places next to the tables, lined the room along the wall.

  “I used to come here to drink beer and play pool with my buddies.” There was a wistful note in David’s voice. “I think I even met a few of my old flames in this room.”

  “Everyone has a Sully’s in their past.” Mac stepped up to one of the pool tables. “Didn’t Cameron say that she and Stephen Maguire played pool?”

  “She said that she met him at a lakeside restaurant,” David said. “This was where they met.”

  “It was also where some crazy woman went after Maguire with a screwdriver.”

  One of David’s officers came in carrying a clear evidence bag. “They found this in the water, Chief.” He handed it to David.

  David held up the bag for Mac to see the contents.

  The bag held a screwdriver.

  * * * *

  The Spencer police station was busier than Mac had ever seen it. With two murders at the Spencer Inn, an attack and shooting at Mac Faraday’s home, and a body found in the lake, the media was swarming for information to explain how everything was connected.

  “Has Spencer, Maryland, gone to hell in a handcart since the death of its undeclared queen, Robin Spencer?” some concerned journalists were inquiring of their experts in the studio.

  In either case, all twelve officers on the Spencer police force had been called in to do whatever they could to restore order to the resort town.

  Bogie seemed to be waiting at the door with his notepad and a case file for David and Mac when they arrived from Sully’s. “They got an ID from the fingerprints on that whack job that tried to kill you, Mac. Her name is Celia Tennyson and you were right. She used to be an undercover cop.”

  “Celia Tennyson?” Mac repeated the name.

  “Did you know her?” Mac didn’t like the hint of accusation in David’s tone.

  “Not personally,” he answered. “I knew of her. When an undercover cop’s cover gets blown and people get killed, it gets talked about on the force.”

  “What’s her story?” David asked Bogie to fill them in on the way up the stairs to his office. He had been keeping the evidence from the murders locked in his personal safe.

  “Like Mac said, she’d worked deep undercover.” Bogie raced up the stairs while referring to his notes. “Her and her partner’s covers got blown. A gang working for an organized crime syndicate tortured and killed her partner and gang raped her. After the police caught the gang leader, he turned around and swung a deal with the feds in exchange for information on his bosses. The dirt bag got full immunity and went into the witness protection program.”

  “This much I knew,” Mac told them.

  They were waiting for David to unlock his office door. Usually, when the police station was open for office hours, he kept it unlocked; but since so many people had shown so much interest in getting their hands on Stephen Maguire’s belongings, David was keeping everything under lock and key.

  “This is what you don’t know,” Bogie went on. “Less than a year after this bastard struck his deal with the feds, he was killed along with the two U.S. marshals protecting him. His privates had been amputated pre-mortem. The feds were, and are, furious because without the dirt bag they lost their case against the crime bosses. There’s been a federal warrant out for Tennyson for the last couple of years.” He tapped Mac on the shoulder. “They love you and Gnarly right now.”

  Inside his office, David knelt next to the box safe he kept hidden behind his desk and pressed his thumb against the reader before keying in the combination. “A psycho cop. She was a psycho killer.”

  Bogie continued, “Not only that, but
forensics matched the bullets from her gun to the slugs they found in Emma Wilkes’s head. Since Wilkes was killed Saturday night, that eliminates Tennyson for the Maguire and Faraday hit.”

  Mac stepped back to allow David to set the evidence box on his conference table and remove the lid. “Someone sent her to eliminate everything connected to what Maguire was investigating here, including Bonnie Propst. This has to be connected to Themis, whatever that is.”

  Bogie said, “Wasn’t Themis a Greek goddess?”

  “Titan goddess,” Mac corrected him.

  “Whatever,” was Bogie’s reply.

  David unpacked the evidence from the box. The largest items were the accordion folder and the yellow notepad. He slapped down the folder and proceeded to open it to review its contents. “What connection can a Greek goddess have with these cases that Stephen Maguire had listed on that sheet of paper? And why did he only have these case files and not all of them?”

  Mac was busy re-reading the list of names Stephen Maguire had written in long hand: Freddie Gibbons, Sid

  Baxter, Jillian Keating, Leo Samuels, Gerald Hogan, Douglas Propst.

  “A list of killers.” Sitting down at the table, he stared at the names.

  David repeated his question about why Maguire didn’t have all of the files.

  “Could the ones he didn’t have have been archived?” Bogie tore his eyes from the list he was reading over Mac’s shoulder to look up at David. “If big old Washington is anything like little ole Spencer, after so long, closed case files are scanned into a database and the hardcopy folders get shipped off to the county seat warehouse, where they’re archived.” He glanced down at Mac. “We’re talking about physical space. What are the oldest cases that you know of on that list?”

  “Sid Baxter and Douglas Propst are both over a decade old,” Mac said while glancing into the accordion folder. “And those are the two case files that Maguire didn’t have.” He turned to David. “I think Bogie has a point. Now we need to figure out what connection these cases have with Dylan Booth.”

  With one of her laptops tucked under her arm, Archie burst through the door. “I found the connection between Emma Wilkes and Dylan Booth.” She added in a breathless tone, “I’m going to bust this case wide open.”

  Waiting for her answer, they fell silent.

  A smile filled her face. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

  David asked, “Are you just saying that, or do you really have information?”

  “Oh, do I.” She plopped down in the first empty chair at the table and opened her miniature laptop. “First off, about Emma Wilkes.” She pointed at the screen on her laptop. “Five years ago, Emma Wilkes was a journalist at a network news show, and she did a story about Gerald Hogan.”

  Mac said, “He was one of the names on the list. Accused of raping and murdering a woman after a frat party. The defense tried the victim and insinuated, without any real evidence, that she got herself killed after she and Hogan had consensual sex and her death was an accident. Judge Daniels was the judge on the case. While he didn’t allow her dating history admitted, the defense managed to get S&M sex videos and pictures that she’d uploaded onto the Internet admitted by claiming that they were already public. The trial ended in a hung jury. The prosecution chose not to retry.”

  Archie read the story she had found in her research. “A year after the jury was hung, Hogan was found hung to death in a motel room up in Philadelphia.”

  Mac said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “The medical examiner ruled it a suicide,” Archie said. “Emma Wilkes did a story suggesting that Hogan had been murdered and the police were covering it up because he was a rapist and murderer that got away with it.”

  “Emma was investigating Hogan’s death,” Mac pieced together the connection. “Judge Daniels presided over Hogan’s trial. Dylan Booth worked for Daniels. Then they would have met—”

  “Better than that,” Archie said. “According to my back-ground checks on both of them, they lived at the same ad-dress in the same apartment when they were both undergrads at Georgetown University. They were either roommates or lovers. I prefer to think they were lovers.”

  Mac wanted to know, “Why didn’t she come forward when he was killed?”

  “They had stopped living together years before Hogan’s death. Wilkes didn’t get anywhere with the Hogan story and it went cold. I called her news station and they told me that she’d first started investigating the Hogan case after getting an anonymous tip that he’d been murdered. Then, less than a month ago, she picked it up again after getting another anonymous tip from a different source in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  David grinned. “I wonder if Stephen Maguire was that second informant.”

  “Booth was the first,” Mac said. “He knew Emma from before and when he happened onto his story, he called her. But he kept what he knew close to the vest until he got a job guarantee from Maguire for blowing the whistle.”

  “How do you know that?” David asked.

  “I investigated his murder,” Mac replied. “Booth was a Stephen Maguire wannabe.”

  Archie picked up the scenario. “After the Hogan story went cold, Wilkes got assigned to an affiliate in the Midwest and had pretty much dropped the story because it was going nowhere. Booth was killed while Wilkes was in Chicago.” She wondered, “Maybe they had a lover’s quarrel because Booth knew the truth but was afraid to tell it.”

  Mac said, “Or chose to hold out for the highest bidder: a choice slot in the U.S. Attorney’s Office or a bribe to keep his mouth shut.”

  Bogie said, “Too bad none of these people are around to tell us which it is.”

  Mac sat up straight in his seat. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?” David asked.

  “The common denominator.” Mac picked up the list of names and studied it.

  After a long moment of waiting for Mac to fill them in, David urged him to tell them what he had discovered.

  “Freddie Gibbons Junior.” He tapped the name scrawled on the sheet of paper. “Found shot to death in a hotel in Paris. The American Embassy believes he was killed and robbed by a prostitute. Killer unknown.”

  “Maybe it was Tennyson,” Bogie said.

  Mac tapped the next name on the list with his fingertip. “Leo Samuels arranged the murder of a girl he had abducted and raped. He walks free and his lackey is killed in prison. Less than six months later, he’s killed in a drive-by shooting.”

  David said, “You told me he led a street gang. It’s not uncommon—”

  “But wait. There’s more.” Mac jumped out of his seat and began pacing. “Gerald Hogan is arrested for rape and murder. Defense tries the victim. Trial ends in a hung jury. One year later, he’s found hung to death in Philadelphia. Dead.”

  David and Bogie exchanged looks of concern.

  “Douglas Propst.” Mac grabbed the sheet of paper from the center of the table and held it up to show them the name on the list. “Wife is found dead in the river near where he’d been jogging. She’d been beaten to death. Tried twice. Jury hung both times. Shot to death. Murder unsolved. Dead. Just like the others on this list. D-E-A-D, dead.”

  “It gets scarier.” Archie went to the next name on the list. “Jillian Keating.”

  Mac reminded them, “She killed her husband for his money. I found the poison she used to do it. Maguire’s wife was her lawyer. She got the poison suppressed and Keating walked away with all of her husband’s money.”

  Archie tapped the laptop to display Jillian Keating’s beautiful face along with the news items from the Internet. “Found dead in her Las Vegas penthouse of a drug overdose less than a year after she walked out of that courtroom. Las Vegas police have classified it as suspicious.”

  “Sid Baxter gets blown up while under surveillance months after getting off for murder.” Mac’s head was spinning. “It’s too much to be a coincidence. All of these people, they all committed crimes and the e
vidence was strong that they did it and—”

  “Themis is the goddess of law and order,” David said. “Justice. That’s what Themis is. It’s a vigilante group.”

  Mac asked Archie, “Can you find any common denominators in who handled these cases?”

  Archie shook her head. “I’ll keep looking.”

  “Judge Daniels?” Mac said, “Booth must have found out about this secret group of theirs while working for him.”

  Archie said, “Here’s another piece of information. I found an obscure item on the Internet, an interview dating around the time of Vivian Propst’s death, with her godfather, who was none other than Judge Randolph Daniels. He had no children of his own. According to the interview, she was everything to him.”

  “That’s the judge’s connection to Douglas Propst,” David said.

  Mac said, “Judge Daniels had been a judge for forty years. Maybe he snapped after his goddaughter was murdered and her killer managed to escape justice. Dylan Booth found out about what he’d done, or was doing, and tried to sell Maguire evidence about them in return for a prime slot in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I bet that folder box that disappeared when Dylan Booth was murdered contained evidence about Themis.”

  “But who’s involved in this vigilante group?” Bogie asked. “They sent out a whacko ex-cop to cover up their tracks. Sounds to me like they’re organized.”

  Mac continued pacing. “Daniels killed himself the night before Booth was murdered. The last thing Booth did before he left that office was call Stephen Maguire, which was why I insisted that Maguire was the killer. Maguire stated that he never spoke to Booth, and that his call went to voice mail.”

  David asked, “Could Dylan Booth have called someone else when he wasn’t able to get through to Maguire?”

  “There weren’t any other recent calls listed in his log.”

  “How about his email or IM?” Archie suggested while peering into the evidence box.

  “Or maybe this Booth kid didn’t call anyone,” Bogie said. “Think about it. This judge was involved with this secret vigilante group. You’re suggesting this box had evidence in it, that the kid was stealing it for whatever reason. Wouldn’t you think that if there was incriminating stuff in the judge’s office, as soon as word got out that he was dead whoever else was involved in this group would hightail it to his office to get it out of there?”