Apex Predator (25 page)

“In the meantime, you’ll take a short leave of absence and go join your family; that is where you need to be. We’ll backstop you here if the need for it arises.”

That let Steven know that the old man had thought he might do something like this and had already established a plan for whatever contingency came up, the police, FBI, anything.

Steven had put down the drink and the cigar and had only one more thing he needed to talk about with the General, “Sir, Marybeth and the kids are at her parents’ house, I was thinking of tapping into my 401(k) to…”

Again he was interrupted, “Don’t worry about that. If the time comes, we will take care of Beth and the kids through some of our international operations. They will be fine.”

At that point Steven finally let loose of all of his emotions, of the stress and tension that he had been operating under for the last couple of days. He put his head in his hands and began to cry softly, partly because the adrenaline was wearing off and everything was starting to come crashing down at once and partly out of immense grief. The realization of what he had done, of its consequences and of the effect it would have on his family, was placing its full weight on his shoulders and he finally let go. He was also enormously grateful to have worked for this man, a man for whom the human side of what they did was just as important as everything else.

Goodman stood from behind his desk, walked over to him and simply put his hand on his back. They stayed like that for some minutes and then the silence was broken, “Steven, take care of whatever you have to take care of. Go to your family and if you need to, call Zeidler. He’ll know what do.”

Steven nodded, wiped his face, stood up and took the General’s hand, “Sir, I can’t begin to thank you and…”

Goodman waved him off with a small smile, “Enough of that crap, just remember to call Zeidler if the time comes. He’s on retainer and he’s the best.”

Steven went to his office and picked up all the research he’d printed out and all of the files Carl Gilliam had put together for him and put them in his briefcase. As he was thinking of what he would need, he remembered and came back to pick up the number that Leonard had given him, Dr. Jim Scoma’s number.

Robert Grady got to the precinct and went immediately to his office. He closed the door behind him, went to his desk and pulled out a bottle of Maker’s Mark from the bottom drawer of his desk. He emptied the bit of cold coffee from the paper cup sitting on his desk and poured himself a healthy shot, something he hadn’t done in some time. He leaned back and turned to face the window. He went back to his desk, picked up the phone and made the call he knew he had to make.

After he picked up Scoma’s number, Steven Loomis was going through the little notes Steph always left on his desk at the end of the day with the little details that all of the files of his deals were most likely missing. There were quite a few. As he was looking through the notes, he came across a sealed envelope from the General’s office. He read the note inside and once he was finished burned it and put the ashes in the trash. Just as he’d thought, the General had already developed a plan. He looked around his office and was getting ready to leave when his phone rang. Everyone in the office knew about his situation, so he knew it wouldn’t be anyone from GIC, and every one of his clients was being handled so he knew it wouldn’t be any of them. It had to be the General or someone in his family.

He came around the desk and picked up the phone, “Hello?” He recognized the voice on the other end of the phone immediately.

“You really didn’t trust us to take care of it? You think we are incompetent, I guess.”

Steven sat down, “Hello, Detective Grady. I’m surprised to hear from you.”

Grady wasn’t going to let it go, “Seriously, this is how you want to handle this?”

Loomis didn’t have a plan formulated for whatever would come next, but now, having this conversation with Grady, he realized he would have to have a conversation with the man eventually. He was incredibly thankful that he’d opened the note from Goodman before the phone rang.

He still needed to be careful with what he said, however, because whatever else Grady might be, he was not stupid, “Detective Grady, I don’t know what it is you are referring to, but if this has something to do with the shooting at the courthouse, you need to know I was in a meeting, a videoconference as a matter of fact, at the time the shooting occurred.”

Grady paused. Had he made a big mistake? Like with Riche, had he made his move too soon, made too many assumptions? Then it hit him. Of course Loomis would have thought to have an ironclad alibi, something that was solid. He probably had at least a dozen people who would swear that he had been in that conference room at the time of the shooting. Now what, did he push the point with Loomis or did he take more time and regroup?

Maybe he’d settle for something in the middle, “I see. Well, my mistake, I thought I would call you, you would own up to shooting the man that murdered your daughter, which we both know you did, and then we would figure out what to do next. I forgot about the resources at your disposal and that you would have an airtight alibi before you ever thought of actually shooting him.”

Loomis felt a pang of guilt. Maybe he was right, maybe he should just own up to it now. That was the problem, though,
maybe
that was the thing to do.

He needed time to figure out what he was going to do next, what the right thing to do was, and that meant that
now
was not the time. “Detective Grady, I know it’s been a difficult case and that you and your team have invested a lot in it, but I’m not your man. I can see why you would think that it was me, but I’ve been straight with you throughout this whole thing, and like I just explained, I was in a meeting at the time.”

Grady listened. Loomis almost had him going again. Almost. Robert Grady had honed his instincts over a lot of years, working cases in vice, organized crimes and homicide, and whatever else he knew to be true, he knew that this man had shot Donald Riche just an hour earlier.

“Well, my mistake then. I
am
sorry about your daughter, Loomis. You take care.”

On his end of the phone, Steven hung his head and said his goodbye, again with a pang of guilt, “I appreciate it, detective. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Grady couldn’t resist, “Yup, I think you can count on that.”

They both hung up. Loomis finished packing his things and finally left his office. He had the bag with the things he would need from home ready and packed in a small duffle bag he’d left in the GIC lobby behind the front desk. He picked up the duffle bag, went down to the street, caught a cab to the airport, and got on his way to his in-laws’ house.

As a police officer Robert Grady had always enjoyed the clarity of what was right and what was wrong. It was true that in 25 years on the force there had been times when that line had been blurred, but in the end he had always been able to come back to the compass that had guided him through his career. This was different. He had been conflicted from the beginning, from the moment that he allowed Loomis to become a part of the investigation. He had known that in reality it was the most prudent thing to do, that the man’s experience, resources and most of all his motivation would make him more of a hindrance to the investigation had he tried to shut him out, but deep down inside Robert Grady had known that this scenario was in one way or another a very real possibility. He had known that because he himself was a father, because Loomis’s entire career and training was geared toward assessing situations and coming up with an operational objective to be met.

Grady could rationalize all he wanted and try to make himself believe that he thought Loomis just wanted closure, just to know what happened to his daughter so he could move on. He could try to do it, but now he knew he would never succeed.

What bothered Robert Grady the most about all of it, however, wasn’t that he had known this was going to happen and hadn’t done anything about it, actually had facilitated it to an extent. No, what bothered Robert Grady the most was that he was actually glad it had happened. It was something he would have never believed of himself. Throughout his career, he had run into the worst humanity had to offer and as much as he had wanted an angry father or husband or brother to exact revenge, to punish those that had hurt their families, he believed in the justice system, believed in his job and in the job of all of those that were charged with bringing the bad guys to justice. He had never felt sympathy for those that wanted to play police, judge and executioner, and yet here he was, sitting in his office, glad that the son of a bitch had his brain blown out, that he was no longer drawing air.

As he was sitting in his office lost in contemplation, he heard a knock at his door. He turned to see Mark Mullins on the other side of the glass and he waved him in.

Mullins came in and was clearly excited, “Hey, Bob, were you there when…”

He caught himself in mid-sentence when he saw Grady and saw that his suit was covered in blood spatter.

He looked at the cup in his hand and the bottle on the desk and let himself plop down on the chair on the other side of the desk, “Mind if I get myself one of those?”

Grady pushed the bottle toward him. Mullins downed the coffee he had left in his mug and poured himself a stiff drink.

“I guess you were pretty close, huh?”

Grady smiled sideways, “About as close as I could get without getting shot myself…”

Mullins took a sip of his drink, “Any idea about who did it?”

Grady drained his cup. If he hadn’t put it together yet on his own, maybe it would be better to leave Mullins out of it. “Nope, you’ve heard the news, they sent half of the NYPD looking for the guy and they came up with nothing.” Both men sat without saying anything for a couple of minutes.

Finally Mullins broke the silence, “You know it had to be a pro, right? I mean, it definitely wasn’t some wacko with a gun taking pot shots. I’ve been at that building and I’ve loaded plenty of perps at the loading dock. To put a shot in there from any distance, you’d have to have had some training. Do you think it might have been an inside job? Plenty of people out there who wanted the guy dead.”

Grady listened to his friend and just looked at him.

He was quiet for two beats after Mullins was finished speaking and then he spoke himself, “Well, you are definitely right about one thing, whoever did it had some training and not just some training, he had to be a sniper or a marksman.

“He also had to know enough about police procedures and how Riche would be transported. He also had to know the speed with which the department would respond and how far the immediate response net would reach, because he would have had to had set up the shot far enough away that he would be beyond the immediate perimeter.

Mullins was listening and nodding. Everything Grady was saying made perfect sense. “You’re right, that’s a pretty specific set of skills, the thing now is going to be looking into who had enough of a reason to…”

It was then that it also hit Mark Mullins, “Oh, my god…Loomis?” Grady just looked at him.

Mullins went on, “He couldn’t have, Bob! He’s not a nut or some sort of wacked-out vigilante, I mean, is he?”

Grady gave Mullins a knowing look, “I just spoke with Loomis, caught him at his office. He says he was in a meeting, a videoconference, at the time the shooting went down. That means that not only were there other people in the same room who will swear up and down that he was in that meeting, but there is a video feed with a time stamp that can be checked to corroborate his story.”

Mullins stared at Grady as he was processing what he had just heard. Like Grady, once he made the connection, there was no doubt as to who had done this. There were simply too many coincidences, not based only on the facts as everyone knew them: that Loomis’s daughter had been one of the victims, that Loomis had been a Navy SEAL commander for 10 years, and that the shot that had killed Riche could only be made by a few people, most likely with sniper training.

Those things alone made Loomis a prime suspect. Mullins also knew what Grady knew, that he had been in on part of the investigation, that he had been the catalyst for the police to go into Riche’s warehouse, that he had seen his daughter in that freezer. Those were all things that, for Mullins, made Loomis not the prime suspect but the only suspect. Hearing what he had just heard from Grady went directly against what he thought was certain and like Grady he was going through a moment of doubt. His own moment of thinking that maybe, just maybe, it really hadn’t been Loomis. But like Grady, he was also not a green detective with just a couple of years under his belt. He was a seasoned homicide detective with years of experience in investigation.

Grady just watched Mullins go through the same process he’d gone through when he had spoken to Loomis. He watched him go through his own moment of doubt and also watched as he had come back to what he knew to be the truth.

Mullins shook his head, “I don’t care if Jesus himself comes down from heaven and swears on a bible that Loomis was in that meeting, it was him. You know it and I know it.”

Grady didn’t say anything; he simply took a sip from his cup and nodded.

Mullins went on, “Shit, we let him into this, we let him see his daughter! Goddamnit!”

Grady leaned forward and looked at Mullins. He could see he was really taking this hard, “Listen, first of all we don’t have any evidence that it was him. I mean, I think we both know it was him, but the man has a pretty rock-solid alibi and he’s denied doing it.

“Until there is some concrete evidence, there is absolutely nothing that ties Loomis to the shooting…nothing except for us and what we know.”

Mullins looked intensely at Grady without saying anything. Both men were thinking the same thing, ‘Are we going to say anything?’ In the end that was really the question, wasn’t it? Grady was right, there was absolutely no physical evidence and both men knew that there would be none, that if it had been Loomis, not a hair would be found anywhere near the shooter’s position. And even finding the shooter’s position was going to be difficult to do if not impossible.