Split Second

by Catherine Coulter

  She said, “About the letter, Dillon, maybe I should have told you when you came to my house—”

  He raised a hand, cutting her off. “I know about it now. Tell us where you left it.”

  “I folded it carefully and slipped it in the back of a book on UFOs on a shelf near my grandmother’s desk two days ago. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t be safe there. I don’t think anyone had looked in there in years.”

  Savich tapped his pen on the table. “That means someone knew the letter existed, or maybe suspected it existed. They took it before the attempt on your life. If you had died, Lucy, then there would be no evidence there ever was a letter, so there would be no possible clues leading to them. Either that or the people were looking for the ring, and when they found only the letter, they assumed you had the ring with you.”

  Coop said, “We didn’t see any obvious evidence of a break-in. It occurred to us someone might have bugged the house, since they seemed to know so much.”

  “We’ll get a countersurveillance team over there to check for bugs, look more carefully for signs someone was poking around your grandmother’s study. Lucy, can you think of anyone who could have known about the letter?”

  “Maybe someone at the bank or the law office. Otherwise, I only told Coop about it yesterday. We didn’t mention it to my relatives last night.”

  Savich leaned forward now, and looked at her dead-on. “Why did you take so long to admit there was a letter, Lucy?”

  Coop took her hand, squeezed it, a simple thing, really, but it steadied her, kept one of her endless apologies from popping out of her mouth. She said frankly, “I believed I should keep the contents of the letter private, since it was about my family and the events happened so long ago. Since there wasn’t any question about who killed my grandfather, it was no one’s business.”

  Savich nodded. “Okay, Lucy, point taken. But now it’s a different ball game. Tell us all as close as you can what the letter said.”

  She looked at each of the agents in turn, then said, “The bottom line was that my grandmother told my grandfather about the ring right after the death of my mother. He wrote about how she kept talking about the ring, about if only she’d had it with her, the ring could have saved my mother, and then she showed him the ring. He wrote that in her grief, my grandmother became obsessed with the ring and he feared for her sanity, and so he stole it. He said he couldn’t destroy it since it was my birthright, but he knew my father wouldn’t want me to have the ring, and so he was leaving it to me along with this letter to open after my father’s death. Of course, he never realized my father would die so young. He believed I’d be reading his letter when I was middle-aged. That’s about it.”

  “He called it your birthright,” Ruth said. “A birthright implies it was something incredibly special, and only for you.”

  Ollie asked, “What exactly happened to your mother, Lucy?”

  “She was struck straight on by a drunk driver. My grandparents were in the car behind her.”

  Savich said, “If your grandmother had only had the ring with her, she could have saved your mother? How could a ring stop a drunk driver from hitting your mother’s car? Did your grandfather’s letter tell you what those supposed powers were?”

  “He wrote I wouldn’t believe him if he did.”

  And then, of course, Savich asked the most important question of all. “Do you have any idea now what those powers are?”

  As far as I can tell, I see absolutely nothing at all special about the ring. Or, if there is, I can’t figure it out. Believe me, I’ve tried to find out why anyone would want this ring badly enough to want to kill me for it.

  Lucy wished she could say that whopping lie out loud, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She looked at him, mute for a moment, white as her shirt, the purple bruise on her jaw in stark relief. She said slowly, trying to lie clean, “No, I have no idea why the ring is so special. As I said, my grandfather didn’t tell me because he said I wouldn’t believe him. But someone believes the ring has some sort of power, and that someone believes he may know what it is.”

  She knows, of course, and it scares her to her heels, Savich thought, but he only nodded. He didn’t expect her to say any more, and she didn’t. Maybe she couldn’t; maybe she was forbidden to. He shook his head at himself. His imagination was running away with him. He said, “Lucy’s right. Someone thinks he knows what the ring can do, and it’s worth killing for. Do you still wear it around your neck?”

  She nodded.

  “May we see it?”

  Slowly, Lucy pulled the gold chain out of her shirt, the ring threaded through it. Every eye in the room went to it, as if pulled by an invisible wire. She took the ring from the chain and handed it to him.

  Savich rolled it around in his palm and passed it to Dane to look at. He said, “You’ll see there’s that single Welsh word etched into it—SEFYLL—it means to stop moving, to become stationary.”

  “Stop moving what?” Ollie said.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said.

  Dane said the word aloud, and again, her heart seized for a moment, but nothing happened. All the agents had to repeat the word, and some of them got it close. Ruth said it right on the button. Lucy jerked, couldn’t help it, and she knew Savich saw it. As for Coop, he held her hand and said nothing at all.

  Lucy took the ring back from Ollie, slid it onto the gold chain, and slipped it inside her shirt. All of them looked at the small bulge where the ring lay warm against her flesh.

  “Your relatives,” Ruth said, “the Silvermans. They all know about the ring?”

  “They denied even knowing about the ring; they didn’t show any interest when I told them last night. I know they have to be our first suspects, given what’s happened, but it’s hard to accept that. I grew up with them in my life, and they’re the only family I have left.” She looked around the conference table as she spoke.

  Families, Savich thought. They were the very devil, if you wanted to be objective. “Lucy, I know how hard this is for you, but you need to keep an open mind. Now, you’re butt-deep in the swamp here. I want you to stick with Coop. Consider him another pair of jeans.”

  Lucy saw Coop’s pants lying on the floor next to her bed, saw that Coop was grinning at her. She said, her voice cool, “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  There was a good deal of laughter.

  Savich looked at Lucy again. “I could bring the Silvermans in for an interview, either together or separately, but the fact is, you and Coop have already found out what they had to say. We have no evidence yet of any complicity between them and the two men who tried to kill you, or the theft of the letter, so we don’t have enough probable cause to get a search warrant. They probably wouldn’t even speak to me without a lawyer at this point. So I’ll treat them as your family unless we find something definite to talk to them about.”

  He paused for a moment, searching her face. “However, I’ve already done some checking into Alan Silverman’s financial dealings, and his longtime presidency at the Washington Federated Bank. You said you thought he was very rich, and retired from banking?”

  “Yes, he retired nearly two years ago. As far as I know, he’s always had a great deal of money.”

  “Lucy, he didn’t retire from the Washington Federated Bank like you were told. The board voted him out for gross mismanagement. He lost the bank a great deal of money in the recent financial crisis. The bank may be insolvent, and if the FDIC closes it, he will lose all the equity he has left. There’s even the possibility of an indictment. So, we can’t write off financial motives on his part, if he’s involved.”

  How could he use the ring to fix this? It was odd, Lucy thought, but she wasn’t all that surprised. Ever since their visit to Uncle Alan’s house last night, she’d begun to see him with new eyes. Aunt Jennifer and Court, too. Now she wondered if she’d ever really known Uncle Alan, or his family. Her heart pounded. She’d never known her own father, either.
She said, “I guess I understand why no one told me the truth about it. Maybe Court and Miranda don’t know what really happened.”

  “One more thing, Lucy,” Savich said. “Whoever tried to kill you failed spectacularly. They’re going to be afraid now, afraid and maybe desperate. I want you and Coop to be very careful. Remember, close as a pair of jeans.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Georgetown

  Friday night

  Savich felt the length of his wife’s body beneath him, all loose and relaxed now. He breathed in the scent of her as he nuzzled her neck. He finally managed to lift himself off her and rest his weight on his elbows, but he couldn’t resist kissing her again. He loved her mouth, her tongue. It made him crazy. “Do you remember way back when you were staying with me so I could protect you? Like Lucy and Coop? And you had that very fortuitous nightmare?”

  She hummed deep in her throat. “And you came galloping in on your white horse to save me. No, wait, it was white boxers. And you stayed, to my everlasting gratitude. Goodness, what a time that was, Dillon.” She hugged him tight. “The luckiest day in my life was when I shot you in Hogan’s Alley.”

  He kept kissing her, then said, “Do you know I still have those pants I ripped that day?”

  “I’ve seen them hanging in the back of the closet. Do you want to get them mended?”

  “Oh, no, it would be like destroying a wonderful memory.” He laughed, rolled over on his back, and brought her against his side. “More than six years we’ve been together. Now we’ve got Sean, and another big honking mess on our hands, just like we did then.”

  “Big honking messes—nothing new in that.” She kissed his neck, lightly rubbed her palm over his chest, then rested her face against his shoulder. “Our lives, I suppose, aren’t what you’d call exactly normal, are they? Not like the Perrys next door, for example, an accountant and a paralegal.”

  “Would you want us to be in those types of professions? To be nine-to-fivers?”

  “Since it’s never even been a consideration, I’d have to guess no. The thing is, Dillon, both of us are a perfect fit for what we do, a perfect fix for what we are, and that makes us really lucky. Sometimes I wonder what I’d have become if I’d never met you. I don’t think it would be a pretty picture, Dillon.”

  He ran his palm down her hip, pausing here and there to knead. “Have I ever told you that you’ve got a lovely, twisted brain? I love to watch the way you figure your way through the murkiest problems. Let me add that when you take chances, it scares the bejesus out of me.”

  “You’re not alone in that, but I guess it’s part of the job description. It’s what we are, Dillon, and I pray every day it’s what we will continue to be until we’re too old to aim our SIGs.”

  “I find myself thinking it’d be nice to go fishing in a nice mountain lake somewhere—we’re eighty or so—and when we finally manage to row back to shore, there’ll be Sean and his family waiting for us, and all our grandkids.”

  “What a lovely thought. Only thing is, I really hate fishing.”

  “I’ll do all the dirty work for you, not to worry.”

  She grinned against him, and he felt it. She leaned up to look down at him. “I know a couple of wives married to cops, and they’re always stewing about danger, and I’ve seen the fear of something happening to their husbands come to define their marriage.”

  “The reason for so much divorce,” Savich said.

  “At least both of us are together, to help each other, to look out for each other. I think we’re right where we need to be, Dillon, as long as we feel we make a difference.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I hope we do make a difference.”

  She sprawled again against him. “Dillon, do you think Coop and Lucy are sleeping together? I mean, they do remind me a bit of us, and look where that led.”

  “They don’t dislike each other any longer, that’s for sure.”

  “And it’s you who put them together because they weren’t getting along. Coop’s reputation—I guess that isn’t a problem any longer. Now it’s like a red beacon glowing whenever the two of them get within six feet of each other.”

  “I never believed his reputation, anyway,” Savich said. “It didn’t fit the man.”

  Sherlock sighed. “This whole ring-and-letter business—at least she did tell Coop about the letter, so that’s no longer a big secret.”

  He said, “It’s driving me nuts trying to figure out what the blasted ring can do. How could it have saved Lucy’s mother? If it could have, somehow, then it’s something miraculous, I know it in my gut. But what?”

  She said, “That word—SEFYLL—it means to stop, to be stationary, right? What does that mean? What stops?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’ll come out.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t hold out much hope. Lucy’s a clam, and maybe she has to be—or maybe she’s supposed to be.”

  “If they get married, do you think they can stay in the unit together?”

  “That’ll be up to the director and Mr. Maitland. I’d have no problem with it. It would be pretty weird if I did.”

  “Can you imagine the jokes? We’d be known as the dating service of the bureau.” She added, “I forget to tell you, I got a call from Dane before I came up to sing a bedtime duet with Sean. Dane thinks he’s got a bead on the guy who may have driven the other white van. He’s betting his name’s Andrew ‘Hoss’ Kennen, a twotime felon, spent time in Briarwood with the dead guy, Ben Eddy Dukes. The two of them got paroled about the same time.”

  Savich heard her voice slow, knew she was about ready to hang it up. So was he.

  He kissed her, said against her temple, “I heard the weather’s going to be great tomorrow. Why don’t we ask Coop and Lucy to go to the park with us tomorrow morning.”

  “That’d be good,” Sherlock murmured, tucked herself closer, and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 58

  Delaney Park

  Saturday morning

  Savich flicked the Frisbee to Sean, who yelled as he caught it, then whipped it off to Coop, who, surprised, had to back up ten feet to snag it out of the air.

  Lucy whistled. “Great throw, Sean. You had Coop on his heels.”

  “Looks like another champion Frisbee player,” Sherlock said, and promptly dropped the Frisbee Coop sailed to her.

  “Mama, you dropped it! We’ve got to start over!”

  Sherlock apologized, promised to pay attention, and sent the Frisbee toward Lucy. They got into a nice steady rhythm until it was Sean’s turn to miss one. He picked up the Frisbee, hugged it to his chest, and did a little dance. “I dropped it, but it doesn’t matter. We broke the record. Twenty-one catches without dropping it. I counted real careful, Mama. Marty won’t believe it. You’ll tell her it was twenty-one times, won’t you?”

  “Yep, I swear.”

  Marty Perry wouldn’t be happy, she thought, ruffling her son’s dark hair and smiling into his glowing face.

  At least the weatherman hadn’t lied—it was a lovely morning, bright sunshine, the temperature hugging sixty. Another dozen Frisbee throws and all of them would be tossing off their jackets. The small meadow in the park was empty except for the five of them. Soon, though, Sherlock knew, more families would show up, excited kids in tow, and the Frisbee circle would steadily grow larger as Sean, always ready to make new friends, invited kids and parents to join until it was a zoo. The adults would then diplomatically excuse themselves so it was a kids-only Frisbee fest.

  But for now, Sean wanted to throw the Frisbee farther and farther—okay if they missed now, since they’d broken the record—until Savich saw Sean was panting, his face red. “Let’s take a break,” he called out, flipped the Frisbee to Sherlock, and headed for the cooler set against a huge old oak tree. He grinned, hearing Sean announce to Coop and Lucy that Daddy was tired.

  He’d just turned, smiling, with bottles of lemonade in his hands, when there was a loud cracking
sound.

  Savich flew backward, blood spurting out of his chest.

  CHAPTER 59

  Lucy saw Savich hurled back, the bottles of lemonade flying out of his hands. All the blood, a fountain of blood—oh, God, he’s dead. She didn’t think, sprinted toward him as she grabbed the ring and yelled, “SEFYLL!”

  Everything stopped.

  After an instant, she saw Savich standing near the cooler again, and she ran all out, knew she had to get to him before eight seconds ticked away. If felt as if she was running in a dream, her legs moving molasses-slow, as if she was stroking against the tide, as if time itself was pushing against her, and she fought desperately to outrace the passing seconds. She knew if she didn’t reach Savich, he would die again. White noise filled her head, and every fiber of her strained to get to him before that eighth second clicked past, and the present would be past again, and Kirsten would shoot him in the heart. She wanted to scream at him to move, but she knew he couldn’t hear her. So far away he stood, not knowing that within a second, he was going to be dead.

  Now Savich was rising from the cooler again, the bottles of lemonade in his hands, turning toward them, smiling. Lucy screamed at him, and he looked at her, startled, just as she smashed into him, sending both of them flying backward to the ground. Not an instant later, a gunshot rang out over their heads.

  There were shouts and more gunshots, fast and close. Savich flipped her under him, covering her as best he could. All Lucy could think was I was in time; I got to him in time; thank you, God. She felt him unclip his SIG and roll off her, returning fire. She marveled at how fast he’d reacted to keep her safe.

  “Stay down, Lucy!”

  But she rolled over onto her stomach, unclipped her own SIG, and fired. She heard the others firing as well, all of them in the direction of the trees at the far end of the park.