Blood Silence (18 page)

She was trapped.

There were two options—the bathroom or the closet. The closet was big, had hiding places, clothes, and lots of things to throw if need be. She ducked inside and moved to the right side—her side of the closet, where there were more long, hanging clothes. As she glanced left to Frederick’s side of the closet, she saw something long and shiny. It was Frederick’s putter, the Odyssey two-ball one with the oversized, heavy steel head on it. She grabbed it and then slipped behind a long row of dresses on her side. As she looked back toward the closet door, she was able to view the antique mirror she stood in front of every morning as she dressed. It was angled toward the bed.

“I’m in my closet now,” she whispered anxiously to the 9-1-1 operator.

“Help is coming.”

• • •

Uptown was hell to drive through—stoplights every block, heavy stop-and-go traffic, even late on a Sunday night. There was a blockage at a light ahead at least ten cars deep in both westbound lanes. The eastbound lane was mostly empty, cars waiting a block down at a stoplight.

“Shit. Gotta do it!”

Mac veered left into the eastbound lane and buried the accelerator, racing ahead into the brightness of eastbound headlights that had the sense, despite now having a green light, to hold their position as he approached. At the intersection, he jerked the wheel right and veered back into the westbound land, car horns honking all around him. A minute later, he reached West Lake of the Isles Parkway on the southeast corner of the lake. It was a one-way street winding its way counterclockwise east around the lake.

Problem was, Meredith was on the west side.

The fastest way was clockwise.

“Shit. Gotta do it!”

• • •

She heard the door to the bedroom creak open.

“I think he’s in my bedroom,” Meredith reported in as soft a whisper as she could muster. Her heart was racing as she watched the mirror, gripping the putter. Then an arm appeared in the mirror’s reflection, and she watched intently as it slowly and deliberately came up, holding something long.

Her hand went to her mouth.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

The shots were muffled—suppressed—but they were shots nonetheless.

She held her breath, her arms shaking, and it felt as though her heart was going to explode out of her chest.
Go away,
she thought.
You’re done. You’ve killed me—now leave.

But he didn’t.

The shooter realized something wasn’t right.

The body in the bed didn’t react to the shots. Meredith could see the shooter’s reaction and confusion in the mirror. He moved to the left side of the bed and whipped off the blankets and saw the pillows underneath. The shooter immediately turned to his right and looked in Meredith’s direction, toward the closet and bathroom, the only two options for someone to escape.

The man started toward her, moving cautiously, gun up, getting closer.

Meredith crouched down to set her phone on the floor. Then she slowly stood up and tightened her grip on the putter with both hands as the man—big, dressed in all black—bit by bit moved toward the closet door.

He disappeared from the view of the mirror, and she knew he’d moved close to the wall as he approached the closet door.

She couldn’t just try to hide.

This man killed her husband. He killed Gentry.

He was there to kill her, to finish the job.

She had to fight.

She had to get past him and get out of the house.

Meredith slid out of her hiding spot, breathing rapidly through her nose as a bead of sweat ran down her forehead.

She could sense him approaching the opening to the closet.

The man was being oh so cautious. He knew she was in the closet, hiding and maybe waiting to attack.

Her hands became moist as she gripped the putter, slowly raising it from the floor over head.

There was a siren.

It was faint in the distance at first, but the sound rapidly increased in intensity.

It was closing fast.

Then colored light flared through a window, illuminating the white walls of the bedroom.

There was a flash of movement in the mirror.

• • •

Mac roared north along West Lake of the Isles Parkway. Two cars ahead saw him coming and veered off to the side.

As he came around a right bend, he saw Meredith’s house up on the left and hit another button inside the center console. The glove box opened, and a tray dropped down from above with a Glock 9mm resting inside.

He turned hard left into the driveway and accelerated up, reaching for the gun as he turned to the right and slammed the brakes, screeching to a stop under the large portico to the front door. Out of the truck, he sprinted to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. He stepped back and kicked it in just below the knob and then jumped to the left side, crouching low, scanning the inside of the foyer, gun out front.

A shadow appeared on the landing of the second floor. Mac looked up. His arms followed.

“Mac! Mac, is that you?”

“Meredith, are you okay?”

“He just went out the back, I think through the door to the garage!”

“Stay in the house!”

Mac pivoted back out the front door and ran to the south side of the house, stopped, gun up, scanning. Across the driveway was a two-foot crevice between the fence for Meredith’s property and the wrought-iron fence for the mansion to the south. He ran across the driveway to the corner of the fence and quickly peered around the corner, and then in a crouch made his way through the crevice to the alley. When he reached the opening to the alley, he stopped, dropped low, peered out, and listened.

He heard rustling to his left.

At the far end of the alley to the south, he saw a runner.

The flashing lights for the Minneapolis police were approaching quickly, brightening the clear night sky, and Mac could tell they were coming from the north down the parkway along the west side of Lake of the Isles. That was quickest route to the house, but the wrong direction from the chase.

Mac stayed close to the edge on the left side of the alley, running but crouched low, gun up, expecting the intruder to look back around the corner. Thirty feet short of the end of the alley, he darted across to the right side, placed his back against the tall, white fence, and quickly moved to the end of the alley and peeked around the corner down West 28
^th
Street. He saw the exhaust of a dark SUV idling a block up and a man running to reach it.

Mac darted around and ran along the sidewalk, his gun hanging low in his right hand.

The first bullet caught the tree to his left, and the second whistled by to his right as he dove behind a large tree between the sidewalk and street. Two more hit the tree, but there was nary a firing sound. “Fucking suppressor,” he mumbled bitterly as he peeked around the right edge of the tree to see the man running for the SUV getting inside.

Mac rolled to his right, pushed himself up, and burst out into the middle of the street as the SUV accelerated away. He set his feet and fired, pelting the back of the SUV, shattering the glass, but it did not stop. Several blocks ahead, it turned left.

“
Shit!
”

He reached for his phone to call it in and realized he’d left it in his truck.

“
Shit!
”

“Shit! Shit!
Shit!
” he growled as he started sprinting back towards Meredith’s house.

• • •

“Dispatch, we have shots fired, just west of this location,” Sergeant Norman calmly reported into the radio mic on his left shoulder as he stood on the front stoop with Meredith, his right hand resting on his service weapon.

“Oh God! Oh God!” Meredith groaned worriedly. “He better not get himself shot!”

“Who?” a uniformed officer asked. “Who better not get himself shot?”

“Mac. He was chasing after the guy.”

“Mac?” the patrol officer asked and looked at Norman.

“The only Mac I know is Mac McRyan,” Norman said.

“That’s him,” Meredith answered nervously.

“Figures,” Norman replied, shaking his head and reaching again for his shoulder radio, “Dispatch, be advised there is a former St. Paul police officer named Mac McRyan giving chase to the west of this address.”

More police cars flooded into the area, two approaching the house, another two turning right onto West 28
^th
Street. Four more officers approached the house. Two of them glanced left and instinctively reached for their weapons.

Mac emerged from the crevice between the fences.

“Hands up!” the officers ordered, guns drawn.

“Easy! Easy!” Mac answered, tiredly and half-heartedly putting his arms up. “The name’s McRyan. I’m a former St. Paul cop. You need to put out an alert for a large, dark-colored SUV. It will have damage to the back—bullet holes in the tailgate and shattered rear-window glass. It could still be in this general area.”

The officers hesitated, unsure.

“Do it!” Mac growled. “Do it fucking now!”

“I recognize him. He’s McRyan,” one officer stated. The other spoke into his shoulder radio, requesting the alert.

“Jesus, Mac!” Meredith exclaimed as she approached him. She didn’t embrace him or even try to, but after a moment of inspection, she did stick her right index finger in the hole in the right arm of his leather jacket. “Nice,” she noted, shaking her head. Then she looked him in the eye, angry, yet with a modicum of concern, or maybe guilt. “Are you trying to get yourself killed, dumbass?”

“Well, you could have told me about the silencer,” Mac replied, amped up. “
That
would have been good to know about.”

“I … I …” Meredith sputtered.

“Mac? What gives?”

Mac looked left of Meredith and saw a familiar face. “Hey, Normy,” he exclaimed to his old friend, Paul Norman. “How the heck are you? And look at you, a sergeant no less. Congratulations.”

“What
in the hell
are you doing, Mac?” Norman asked, seeing the gun in Mac’s hand and the police lights still flashing in the grill of the Yukon. “Last time I checked, you’re
not
a cop.”

Mac looked at the hole in his coat, the holes in the left leg of his jeans with some blood oozing through, and the scrapes on his left hand. Looking at Norman, he simply said, “So arrest me.”

“
Riiiiight,
” Norman replied, “Just hand me your gun and tell me what the hell is going on here.”

M
ac explained to Norman what the scene at Meredith’s was all about. Then he asked for a favor. “So listen, Normy, any chance I could get a couple of old friends on this?”

“Who do you have in mind?”

Mac told him.

Norman chuckled and understood exactly what Mac was looking for. “Let me make a call.”

A half hour later, veteran Minneapolis detectives Ed Gerdtz and Bud Subject arrived on the scene, followed by a crime scene crew. The beauty of the two veteran detectives and friends working the scene was that certain protocol and procedures were ignored. They let Mac tag along.

Problem was, there wasn’t much to find.

It was clear there was a break-in. The back door of the garage leading into the pool area was wide open, and the main circuit breaker in the fuse box was turned off. Crime scene was printing both the fuse box and the door, not to mention all other surfaces in the house that might have been reasonably touched by the intruder on the way in, based upon Meredith’s recap. Ballistics would be taken on the gun. There were four shell casings.

“Pretty quick thinking by your ex-wife there, Mac,” Gerdtz observed.

“I’ll say,” Subject added.

“She’s smart and always had a pretty cool head under pressure,” Mac answered while the three of them were up in Meredith’s room, checking out the bullet-ridden bed, and then he walked over to the closet and noticed the putter leaning against the wall. Meredith had been hiding in the closet. She heard the siren approaching, and then, when the lights started reflecting in the room, probably when Mac was pulling into the driveway, the killer ran. He couldn’t help thinking that she should be dead. If he hadn’t called her when he did, she would be.

Later, Mac stood with Gerdtz and Subject around their sedan, which was parked down the street from the house. Gerdtz was puffing on a cigarette, the white smoke matching his white, unkempt-yet-thinning, Einstein-like hair while Mac and Subject sipped on convenience store coffees.

“I’m not holding my breath on prints,” Mac muttered, taking a drink of the now-lukewarm coffee. “A silencer, getting into the house like it was nothing, with a planned escape route and driver waiting—that guy was a pro.” He changed his focus to where they had a chance. “For now, that leaves the SUV. Any hits on that?”

Subject slowly shook his head, looking down into his coffee cup. “Not yet. If the guy was a pro, Mac—”

“That SUV is at the bottom of a body of water,” Gerdtz finished. “Or it’s already in a chop shop or being crushed at a junk yard or buried deep in a garage somewhere. Plus, we don’t know what kind of SUV it was, other than big and dark colored. I mean, we’re searching, but …”

Mac nodded in resignation. “It’s a long shot at best, I know. Nevertheless…”

“We’ll keep looking,” Gerdtz answered, exhaling smoke out his nose. “Everyone on duty has their eyes and ears open.”

“So Mac, what the hell is up with this?” Subject asked. “This whole thing doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, why would someone want Meredith dead?” Ed Gerdtz added. “Is there someone out there that angry about her husband’s death that they’d want to kill her? I mean, if you’re right, and you think she was set up, then why kill her? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Mac looked up at Gerdtz. “No, it doesn’t.”

“It does if it causes Mac to stop poking around,” Subject casually suggested as he slid a piece of Wrigley’s into his mouth. “I’ve been paying attention to this thing from afar, and your ex-wife looks guilty. But after tonight, I’m not so sure. So if you assume someone else is responsible for the deaths of Sterling and his mistress, whoever that is seems worried about something, and when I look at what’s changed in the case”—Bud pointed to Mac—“you’re the change. They’ve been watching, and they’re worried about you, Mac.”