The Book of 21 (25 page)

She forced a smile and nodded, then followed him out of the diner and onto the sidewalk.

“What happened?” she asked in a hushed tone.

“Just ran into an old friend; it didn’t go well. Do you still have those tissues from yesterday?”

“No, you used them all.” Amy dug in her purse for a second, and handed him a paper diner napkin. “Do you start every morning by wiping blood off of yourself?”

John stopped, bent over, and wiped most of the micro-spatter off his gray scotch-guarded slacks with a few quick swipes. The rest he would let fade into the dark wool of his pants.

“Well, at least it’s not my blood this time.”

“What happened?”

“The cop I saw was Ben Shalby, and he was the one that had been inside the police force screwing with things. Unfortunately, he was unwilling to share anything, and was willing to fight to keep his secrets. That approach went badly for him—
very
badly.”

“So, you got nothing out of him?”

“I got enough to understand that he was in on it, but other than that, nothing but blood.”

Amy stared blankly at the sidewalk for the next couple of paces, and then asked, “So what do we do now?”

“We buy a shovel.” John nodded toward a big-box hardware store that had an “Open 24 Hours” sign blinking on its facade. He started gimping across the parking lot.

“What do we need a shovel for?”

“Well, Shalby made me think.”

“Yeah?”

“He told me he would take what he knew to the grave. That phrase made me think about some papers that Hallman stashed in his apartment. There were a few things in them that the kid didn’t have time to make notes on. I guess these people got to him first.”

They entered the store and found the gardening aisle. There, he pulled a shovel off the rack.

“What are you going to do with that?” she groaned.

“Dig up an old friend. Anyway, Hallman had the Key of David all along, and he even knew where to use it, though he didn’t spell it out in his notes. I suppose he didn’t want to hand-deliver the location to the wrong people.”

Amy grabbed his arm and looked at him with huge eyes. “You really have it? He talked to everyone about it, but he never said he
had
it,” she said, with a broad grin. That smile then began to fade away, and she sighed, “He said it would make him famous.”

“Well, so far, it’s just made him dead. Getting back to my point, there was an old letter, in which this one guy says that he made sure this other guy took the lock to the grave. I only thought of that…” John stopped, and winced from the pain in his ankle.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yeah, can you run over to hardware and grab a crowbar? I’ll meet you at the register.”

Within minutes, Amy plopped the crowbar down on the counter.

Just as the woman behind the register opened her mouth to tell John the total, she noticed that he was wearing a tattered and dirty business suit. She peered over her bifocal glasses at him.

“I know; I have to stop wearing my best suits to dig ditches.” He handed her the money and waited.

After a few seconds, the woman handed him the change and watched them leave.

When they were back in the parking lot, John continued his story. “Anyway, this old guy, named Trumbull, wrote a letter that said this young guy they had just buried, Evan Fields, took the secret to his grave. Trumbull knew Fields took the secret to the grave, so that would mean Trumbull knew what the secret was. If Trumbull knew it, and was still alive, why wouldn’t Trumbull say
he
, meaning himself, would take it to
his
grave? It just seemed weird.”

She shook her head. “I think I’m confused.”

“I was, but then I remembered Hallman’s exhumation request to dig up Fields. Then it all made sense.”

Amy shot a glance at the tools and then turned pale. She stopped in her tracks, and said, “Oh my God, John. Please tell me that we are not—”

“Yes we are, and I don’t have time to wait for court approval.” He knew that the graveyard was only about fifteen blocks away, but limping that far was out of the question. Through a grimace of pain, he asked, “Can you hail a cab?”

Chapter 32:
Good Luck

Harry Mulgrew watched as George Pew’s fingers danced about the keyboard. George quickly dismissed several security layers, and took a few seconds to caress others so there would be no trace of his entry. Harry was sure that he would have the location of McDonough’s cell phone triangulated within minutes.

While he watched George, he listened to Lou Fanelli’s phone conversation with the officers that were trying to arrest Shalby. Fanelli’s tone was changing; it was becoming softer, and somewhat bewildered. Harry guessed that the officers were finding something unexpected.

With a blank look, Fanelli hung up the phone and sat on the desk. After saying nothing for a few seconds, Fanelli finally breathed, “Shalby is dead.”

George stopped typing and looked at Harry.

The silence in the room lingered until Harry gave George a nod. “Get us in the cell grid fast, George.” Harry turned back to Fanelli, and asked, “Do you have any idea what happened?”

Fanelli shook his head.

“Well,” Harry continued to probe, “who would possibly want to, or have to, kill him?”

“Somebody who wanted to keep him quiet would be my first guess,” Fanelli muttered, avoiding the real answer.

“There is another option that complicates things a little.”

Fanelli nodded.

After a few seconds of silence, George stopped typing and posed the question, “Would one of you two mind sharing this ‘other option’ with me?”

Fanelli answered, “We figured out Shalby might be the one working inside the department. Perhaps Detective McDonough figured that out as well and…”

After a second or two of silence, Harry filled the gap. “John might have figured out that Shalby was involved and confronted him. Without speculating too much, John might have killed him.”

“I’d hate to see what you two cook up when you speculate a lot,” George grunted with a roll of his eyes.

Fanelli smirked.

“I don’t know this guy,” George sighed. “Is there a possibility that McDonough had something to hide?”

“Anything is possible, but I doubt it,” Harry replied. “More likely, there was some kind of scuffle, but we’ll know more when we have time to gather the crime scene evidence. That will come with time, which we don’t have right now.” Harry walked over to the chair by his desk, collapsed in it, and sighed. He then said, “Even worse, if John
did
confront Shalby, then he also probably suspects other cops are involved in this. After all, we suspected Sanford.”

Fanelli nodded. “We may still be proven right about Sanford.”

“Right, but Sanford’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant at this point. Look at it from John’s point of view; you have one cop that may have messed with your personnel record and another, with which you just had a life-or-death encounter. Now, you start to ask how many others are involved.”

“He won’t know who to trust,” Fanelli sighed.

“That’s right. That’s why I called you, Fanelli; he trusted you on the stakeout. If, and remember, we are still not sure, but
if
John almost got killed by one cop and suspects that another has worked to destroy his career, that leads to an association problem. He’ll be wondering whether every cop he sees is there to help him or kill him. To John, the possibility that someone is there to harm him may seem more likely than the possibility that someone is there to help him. Therefore, he may not respond well to a cop suddenly showing up; every animal’s instinct is self-preservation.”

“So the officers that find him may be at risk,” Fanelli said, sounding as if he were a young boy whose mother was forcing him to admit something.

“
Extreme
risk,” Harry added. “If the cop doesn’t inspire confidence, John may err on the side of, uh, let’s say, self-interest. That even applies to you and I, so be careful.”

After a short pause, Fanelli sighed, “We need at least another set of hands. No offense, Dr. Mulgrew, but I’m the only one here that went to the academy, and this is a bit much for one cop to walk into. How can we find cops that McDonough has trusted in the past? They have the least chance of catching a bullet.”

“Last night, John had set up a stakeout—”

“Yeah,” Fanelli interrupted. “I was sent home early.”

That made Harry pause a second. “Interesting… I wasn’t aware of that, but
very
interesting. What I was going to say was, even though he knew someone was on the inside, he trusted two cops, and
only
two cops for the stakeout: you, Fanelli, and your buddy, Jake Moore. You were the first two cops on the scene and you both pointed out some things that didn’t make sense; I’ll lay odds that was what made John feel you two were clean. It looks like the only other cop he might trust is Moore.”

“I’ll call Moore,” Fanelli declared, as he started to dial.

George suddenly blurted out, “I got him. McDonough’s cell phone is active inside the southern portion of the two one five area code; he’s in the city limits. Give me a few seconds.” George brought up a couple of dialog boxes on the screen. “He’s not on the cell phone, but the cell phone is on.”

Harry knew that meant George would not be able to pinpoint the phone, but would get to within a few yards. He put on his jacket, pulled the holster for his revolver out of the desk drawer, and picked up the Smith & Wesson.

“Officer Fanelli, do you have a cruiser with you, so we don’t have to get my car full of bullet holes?”

“I have the unmarked car they gave me for the stakeout last night. It’s not pretty, but it moves.” He pointed at Harry’s pistol, and probed, “How long has it been since you shot that thing?”

“About a week,” Harry answered. In truth, Harry knew he had not fired the gun in over two years, but he was not going to stay behind because he missed time at target practice.

George’s voice rang out, “Boo-yah! I have him; South Philly, a couple blocks north of the Vet.” When George realized Veteran’s Stadium was no longer there, he stammered, “Well, not the Vet—the sports complex—whatever they call it. I don’t watch sports.”

“You don’t say,” Fanelli barbed, with a smirk.

“Let’s go, Fanelli. Tell Moore to meet us there,” Harry said, as he bolted for the door.

George stood up, and shouted, “I’m going too!”

Harry stopped and spun to face the computer jockey. His jaw dropped, and he was unable to say any words. He took a deep breath, and then finally replied, “I need you here to let us know if that phone moves.”

George rolled his eyes.

“George, think about what we were saying; if he doesn’t know you, you might be the first person he shoots.”

George sat back down at the computer, started typing, and said, “Good luck.”

Chapter 33:
A Stop for Pants

Kim barreled down the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At her current speed, she would have to drive almost an hour and a half before reaching Philadelphia. She watched a sign zip past her that read “Rest Area - 1 Mile.” She knew she needed to take care of unfinished business soon; she was still not wearing any pants.

The little Nissan veered onto the ramp for the rest area, and then slowed as it entered a parking lot surrounded by trees. There were very few cars in the rest area, and Kim noticed only two or three people stretching their legs. At a picnic table, a family had apparently stopped to have breakfast. Even though the rest area was not completely empty, Kim decided it was sparsely populated enough to give her a good chance to procure pants without interruption.

Kim parked the Nissan as far away from everyone as she could and reached into the back of the car. Marco had packed her large, hard-shelled, American Tourister suitcase and stowed it on the floor behind the passenger’s seat. She pulled upward on the handle, but the case refused to move. After trying twice more to pull the suitcase loose, Kim realized that when she leaned over the front seat to free the piece of luggage, her weight pried the seat backward, and pinched the suitcase even tighter. If she tried to keep her weight off the seat, however, she failed to get the leverage she needed. It was dreadfully clear that she would have to get out of the car to free the big suitcase from its resting place on the floor behind her.

“Once I get home,
you
are so gone,” she seethed at the suitcase.

She looked around the parking lot. Though it was unlikely that any of Marco’s associates regularly staked out the parking lots of rural rest areas, she was not taking any chances; in this day and age, it would be too easy for Marco to reach out for help very quickly via any number of mobile communication devices.

She reached in her purse, removed a small can of pepper spray, and gripped the can firmly in her left hand. After positioning her finger carefully on the trigger of the pepper spray, she took one last glance around the lot to make sure everyone else was a good distance away from her car, and then stepped out onto the asphalt.

Though her nightshirt was long enough to drape over her upper thighs, she wanted to prevent an unexpected breeze from exposing any private parts; she used her left hand to pin it down. This action also concealed the can of pepper spray against her body. She quickly shuffled around the car, opened the rear passenger-side door, and reached in with her free right hand to grab the suitcase.

Yanking up on the handle revealed that the suitcase was jammed in much more tightly than she had believed. Two more heaves moved the suitcase upward a quarter of an inch. At this pace, she would have to yank on the handle twenty or thirty more times to get it loose.

Kim resolved to go for broke. Letting go of the nightshirt, she bent over and reached across the suitcase. She ignored the breeze that told her she was exposed to the elements, grabbed the far edge of the suitcase with both hands, and began to heave. The suitcase squeaked against the vinyl of the seats as it twisted itself free, and then broke loose.