Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill (26 page)

“Tell me again how you know that there isn’t anything else on them.”

“Diane Farrell looked at them for us.”

Kelly’s eyebrows rose with each word until Mason thought her forehead would vanish. He realized again how lame some things sounded when you tried to explain them to someone else.

“This is the same Diane Farrell who told Angela to witness Sullivan’s codicil without Sullivan’s signature and who showed up just in time to stop Angela from telling you where she was hiding her wiretap tapes?” Kelly asked.

Mason decided to treat her question as rhetorical.

“Yeah,” Blues answered for him. “My money says these disks will get you more than a rise in your Levi’s.”

Kelly picked up her phone again.

“Riley, it’s Kelly. Meet me at the courthouse computer center as soon as you can, and be prepared to do some hacking.”

“Who’s Riley?” Blues asked.

“He’s the register of deeds,” Mason said.

“And, he set up the county’s new computer system,” Kelly said. “If Sullivan hid something on these disks, he’ll find it. And, Lou, another shower wouldn’t hurt.”

“There’s got to be something hidden on those DVDs that will unravel this whole thing,” Kelly said over the wind whipping around the open windows of her pickup.

She worked the stick shift as if it were a natural extension of her arm, engaging the four-wheel drive when they hit a particularly rutted stretch of road that rose and fell like a poor man’s roller coaster. The road was barely wide enough for one vehicle.

“Something worth killing Sullivan, Harlan, and me for?” Mason asked.

Humid morning air, heated by the rising sun, filled the cab and softened the stiffness in his back and neck. The rough ride loosened the tougher kinks that remained from sleeping on the cabin floor. Kelly was pushing the pickup at a fast clip that would have been suicidal for someone unfamiliar with the road. Blues and Sandra followed at a distance in his Trans-Am.

“Not Sullivan. Camaya doesn’t poison people. He shoots them or breaks their neck or runs them off the road. Sullivan may have been on Camaya’s hit list, but somebody beat him to it.”

“Even if you’re right about that, those DVDs are still pretty pricey.”

“Camaya is the only one who thinks about how much it’s worth. That’s how he makes payroll. Price didn’t matter to whoever hired Camaya. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. Whatever is on the DVDs could explain why. You and Harlan may have just gotten in the way, known too much.”

“But I don’t know anything.”

“Yeah, but the bad guys think you’re a lot smarter. The rest of us know better. You’ve got the DVDs and that’s enough to make you a target.”

Mason braced his hands against the dash as the pickup splashed through a washed-out patch of road and leaped over a hilltop. Kelly let out a whoop as she put the truck into a hard right onto smooth blacktop, where it fishtailed before leveling out. She slowed until she caught sight of Blues turning onto the road.

“Your cabin isn’t exactly on the AAA scenic route.”

“That’s the idea. I’m the only one who knows where it is. That makes it private for me and safe for you.”

“If there are two killers, maybe Sullivan’s murder set off a chain reaction that’s out of control. Sandra calls it chaos theory—the rule of unintended consequences.”

“We can’t rule out anything yet. We haven’t accounted for Sullivan’s movements during the time he was most likely poisoned.”

“Angela Molina has Scott Daniels on tape talking to someone about Sullivan’s death and St. John’s subpoena the same day Sullivan’s body was found,” Mason said. “Scott left the lake before you woke me on the beach. How did he know that Sullivan was dead?”

“You said that Angela didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of Scott’s call. That rules out anyone in the firm. So who was Scott talking to?”

“I don’t know. All I do know is that Scott has been more worried about O’Malley than anything else. When O’Malley fired the firm, Scott lost more than a client—he lost Vic Jr. and Quintex. I’d sure like to find out where that half million dollars in bogus fees ended up.”

“That may be another link to Harlan’s death,” Kelly said. “If he was getting laundered money, I doubt that he would have reported it on his Form 1040. He may have been willing to give up the whole scheme to stay out of jail. Somebody figured Harlan would deal and killed him to shut him up.”

“That makes Angela a link between both murders. She knew about the fees. She bugged the phones. She witnessed the change to Sullivan’s will.”

Mason wondered whom Angela was covering for on the phony bills. He had assumed it was Sullivan because O’Malley was his client. He thought back to his conversation with her and realized that his questions assumed that it was Sullivan. Angela had never said that. Mason had. He remembered the advice he always gave his clients before the other lawyer questioned them: “If he hasn’t got the facts straight, that’s his problem. We’re not here to help the other side.”

Scott and Harlan were the lawyers on the fixtures deals—not Sullivan. Angela could have been covering for them as easily as for Sullivan. The dirty money that was being washed through Sullivan & Christenson’s books may have financed her “loan” from the firm. Her story about Sullivan blackmailing her could have been just that—a story.

Angela had always been one to play every angle. She said the tapes were in a safe place. Mason hoped she had one picked out for her.

Kelly interrupted his thoughts. “The paper trail on the fixtures deals leads to a Chicago law firm that fronts for the mob. Jimmie Camaya works for the mob. Scott and Harlan wouldn’t know how to make those kinds of connections.”

“So they were drawn into the fixtures scam with Vic Jr. He was the O’Malley involved in the fixtures deals, not his father. Camaya used him as bait to grab Sandra, and now he’s missing.”

“Who knew you had the DVDs?”

“Plenty of people. Pamela Sullivan, Sandra Connelly, Diane Farrell, Angela Molina, Maggie Boylan, and Phil Rosa. They’d all seen me with the disks. I’m sure everyone else in the office had heard about them.”

Mason finally understood the reason his house had been trashed—to find the disks. That’s why they left his computer intact. It was a calling card—a message that they knew he had the disks and they wanted them. And they didn’t know whether he had found what was hidden on them. When in doubt, kill first and ask questions later.

Riley Brooks was waiting for them in the computerized nerve center in the basement of the county courthouse. What was once a deteriorating, mildewed graveyard for closed files and ancient furniture was now a gleaming, climate-controlled tribute to high-tech government.

Riley stood in the center of it all, beaming at the gadgetry spread around him. Kelly introduced Sandra and Blues. Each of them was greeted with an enthusiastic handshake and clap on the shoulder.

“All right,” he said to Kelly. “What have you got that old Riley’s supposed to break into?”

He rubbed his palms together and his face shone with excitement as Kelly handed him the DVDs and the Johnny Mathis CD. Mason laid out the essential pieces of the puzzle. Riley listened thoughtfully, tugging occasionally at one of the gray wisps above his ears.

“What do you think, Riley?” Kelly asked when Mason finished.

“I like Johnny Mathis. Always made the missus melt. Mind if I keep it?”

“Be my guest. What about the movies?” Mason asked.

“It’s easy enough to hide data on a disk so that an amateur won’t find it,” he answered as he tapped one disk against the palm of his hand. “But I’m no amateur.”

“Diane Farrell told us she checked the list function and didn’t see anything else on them,” Mason added.

“May not have been on the same program as the video. I’ll check it out through the utilities program. That should identify everything on the disks. If someone was really clever, they could hide the data from that too. It may take time, but I’ll find it if it’s there.”

They left and Kelly took them to the shops ringing the courthouse square. An hour later, Blues, Sandra, and Mason had clean clothes. Their next stop was the showers in the county jail; Mason telling the others that it pays to have connections when traveling.

Clean and dressed, he found his way to Kelly’s office on the first floor of the courthouse. She sat in front of her desk digging through six inches of in-basket, shoving it aside when he pulled up a chair next to her. A faint breeze wandered in the open windows, adding the smell of freshly cut grass.

“Blues and Sandra are checking in with Riley. Where do we go from here?” he asked.

“You don’t go anywhere. Stay out of it. You don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t need any more bodies showing up on my doorstep.”

She answered without looking up from her papers. Her message was clear. Take off.

Mason wasn’t listening. “Why are you so angry with me?”

It wasn’t an innocent question. He knew part of the reason. She had made that plain. He hoped she would tell him that it was his body she didn’t want dumped somewhere. She sat back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, lips pressed flat. She knew what he was asking her, and the answer wasn’t easy. She gave it in a tight, controlled voice.

“Lou, this is a murder investigation, not
The Dating Game
. You are attractive and fun to be with—in spite of your one-liner approach to life. If we’d met another time, maybe something good could happen. But you’re screwing up this investigation.”

“Which means that you’re using your badge to keep me away. You’re protecting yourself, not me. I’m not your dead partner. I’m not a cop and I’m not dirty.”

She flinched, telling Mason that he had hit home. She had become the one bright light in his suddenly chaotic life. He knew he couldn’t hold her if she didn’t want him. But he wasn’t about to roll away into the darkness.

“You’re way out of line, Counselor!”

She bit off each word and spat them at him. They traded hard stares until hers began to redden and glisten. “Damn you!” she snapped and swiveled her chair around, leaving him to argue with her back.

Mason got up slowly. “Blues can find his way back to the cabin even if it’s supposed to be a secret. I’ll wait for you there. Sandra can stay and work with Riley.” No response. He walked to the door and turned, still talking to the back of her chair. “You might want to run Vic Jr. through one of your crime computers, Sheriff. He’s got to be the link to Chicago. Maybe you’ll find something interesting.”

Mason found Blues loading three shotguns and enough ammunition for a small army into the backseat of his Trans-Am.

“Where in the hell did that come from?”

“Store across the street,” he said pointing to Smith’s Hunting and Fishing Shop.

“Did you get a hunting license?” Mason asked, ever the careful lawyer.

“We’re not going hunting,” he said as he slid in behind the wheel. “Get in.”

Mason closed the door and looked again at the armory in the back. “Well, I guess it’s a nice day for target practice, huh?”

“You ever shoot a gun, Lou?”

“No. Is that important?”

Blues smiled. “All depends on how you feel about getting your ass shot off.”

“I’m feeling very attached to my ass, actually.”

“I’m not going to sit up in those woods waiting for Camaya to come looking for us and not have anything to offer him except coffee.”

“Camaya doesn’t know where we are.”

“You killed one of his boys. It would have been better to kill him. He’s getting paid to kill you, so he’s got to find you. He’ll find Kelly and figure you won’t be far.”

“Thanks a lot. You’re the one who brought us here. If you knew Camaya would figure it out, why didn’t we go somewhere else?”

“Because that won’t solve your problem. He’d still find you.”

“So I’m supposed to become a gunslinger overnight and call Jimmie out for a showdown?”

“You’ll be lucky if you don’t shoot your dick off. Shotgun’s your best bet. Know why?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’re about to educate me.”

“A shotgun fires a pattern of shot that spreads out the farther it gets from the gun. It makes up for a lot of weak stomachs and shaky hands.”

“So why does Camaya use an automatic?”

“Ain’t nothin’ weak or shaky about him. He’s got a lot more experience killing folks. But I’ll take a shotgun every time for close work. The New York City Police Department did a study of shootings involving their officers. The average distance between the shooters was seven feet. At that distance, the cops only managed hits thirty-six percent of the time.”

“Lousy shots.”

“Nope. Just human. A man can stand on the firing range all day and put ten out of ten slugs in the center of the target. Trouble is, the target is standing still and isn’t shooting back. When it’s real, anyone with a weak bladder can be a lousy shot. All I want you to learn is how to load, point, and shoot. The shotgun will do the rest.”

They dragged a half dozen hay bales that had been lined against the back of the cabin over to the edge of the woods and stacked them two across and three high to create a makeshift shooting range. Blues positioned each layer so that there was a narrow ledge in front of the second and third bales. They scavenged through the cabin until they found an array of tin cans and other junk that didn’t object to being shot to pieces. Blues arranged their targets on the ledges, picked up a shotgun, and started class.

“This is a semiautomatic shotgun. Once it’s loaded and the safety is off, you pump it and pull the trigger. Keep pulling the trigger, and it keeps firing until the magazine is empty. Anybody who gets in the way will have a very bad day.”