The Inside Ring (10 page)

“And Max Taylor?” DeMarco asked.

“Nothing,” Emma said. “No criminal record with anyone. My guy’s still looking to see if either he or Estep have connections to Edwards.”

DeMarco watched the dark-haired woman say something to her companion, then both women looked over at DeMarco and the dark-haired woman smiled at him again. Definitely a come-hither smile, DeMarco thought. No doubt about it.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Joe,” Emma said. “Why don’t you just go over and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Joe DeMarco and I’m smitten because you look just like my ex-wife. Are you by any chance a slut too?’”

“She doesn’t look like—”

“Yes she does. The same Italian coloring, the same cute little ass—and the same big tits. When on earth are you going to get over that woman?”

DeMarco shrugged.

“How many women have I set you up with, Joe?”

Here we go again, DeMarco thought. But he didn’t answer Emma’s question.

“Three,” Emma said. “And all three were lovely. And they all possessed traits your ex-wife didn’t have, little things like a sense of humor and compassion and intelligence. And they all, God knows why, liked you. And you didn’t call any of them back.”

DeMarco knew she was right. His wife had been vain and spiteful and not all that bright—and she had cheated on him with his own cousin, a shitbag who worked as a bookie for his father’s old outfit. His wife used to tell him she was going to New York to see her mother, and then she and his cousin would spend the weekend in Atlantic City. But she had also been the most sensual woman DeMarco had ever known. And it was more than sex; he had fallen in love with her when he was sixteen and she was fourteen. She had been his first everything: the first girl he had held hands with; the first girl he kissed; the first woman he made love to. He wanted to tell Emma that love wasn’t logical, but they’d had this discussion before. And the mood Emma was in tonight, she’d shred his heart into thin strips.

“You need to get on with your life, for Christ’s sake,” Emma said. “Buy some damn furniture, get a girlfriend, and join the human race again.”

“Okay, okay,” DeMarco said. And yeah, he guessed the woman did look like his ex.

“So where do you think I should go with this, Emma?”

“Are we talking about your social life or the case?”

“The case.”

“I don’t know.”

Emma rarely said “I don’t know.” She sat there for a while, preoccupied with her own thoughts, a long-nailed finger idly tracing the rim of her glass.

“I’m going out of town tonight, Joe. I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. Call Mike if you need something.”

Christ, he’d been so absorbed with his atrophied libido that he’d completely forgotten about Emma’s problem. He felt like a selfish shit.

“Emma, is this about the young woman I met at your place the other night? Julie?”

“Yes.”

“Is she your daughter, Emma?”

Emma hesitated. “Yes,” she finally said.

There was no way DeMarco was going to ask how it was that Emma came to have a daughter. Instead he said, “Emma, what can I do to help? Tell me.”

Emma took a sip from her drink and studied DeMarco over the rim of the glass.

“My daughter’s a brilliant young woman who has terrible taste in men. Two years ago she became involved with a married man. She finally came to her senses and told him that she didn’t want to see him anymore but he won’t let her go. He’s obsessed with her. The last six months he’s harassed her relentlessly. E-mails. Midnight phone calls. He’s had people follow her. He’s tapped her phone. He’s opened her mail. A month ago he scared off a man she was dating and last week he caused her to lose her job, which is why she came home. He’s ruining her life.”

“So tell his wife.”

“Julie did. His wife is a doormat who has tolerated his affairs for years. And she’s probably been abused by this monster and is terrified of him.”

“And the police won’t help?”

“He is the police. Actually he’s the district attorney in a large western city. He’s very rich and very powerful and very well connected. The governor is a personal friend; a U.S. senator is his uncle.”

“What are you going to do?” DeMarco asked.

Her pale blue eyes were as cold and lethal as the polar seas.

“I may kill him,” Emma said.

18

U.S. Army Colonel (Ret.) Byron Moore, was five foot seven, had a slender build, and wore black horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was dark, cut short on the sides, and combed forward on top to compensate for a receding hairline. He also had a slight hunchback and walked with a limp, both conditions caused by wounds incurred in Vietnam. DeMarco always thought of Shakespeare’s Richard III when he saw him.

DeMarco met Moore five years ago. The Speaker had been tipped that an aide to a rival politician was using a military connection at the Pentagon to obtain inside information on defense contracts. The man in the Pentagon would find out which company was due for the next infusion of military moola and the congressional staffer would rush out and buy oodles of stock for himself and his cohort. The Speaker was probably jealous that he had not thought of the scheme himself.

During the investigation DeMarco made the mistake of concluding that Byron Moore was the inside man at the Pentagon. One night while he was following Moore, Moore doubled back on him, flipped him on his ass with some sort of judo move, and promised to crush his windpipe with one finger. Moore smiled when he made the threat. Although DeMarco was four inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than the colonel, he didn’t have the slightest doubt that Moore was capable of doing exactly what he said.

Moore eventually informed DeMarco that he was working for the military on the same case. He also told DeMarco that he had his head so far up his ass that sunlight was but a memory, that he had everything all wrong, and then told him who the real culprit was. His initial meeting with Byron Moore had been an altogether humbling experience.

DeMarco discovered Moore had been a hell of a soldier: Green Beret, three tours in Vietnam, an expert in unarmed combat and demolitions. He had been forced to retire two years ago when he was passed over for a star. When DeMarco asked why he had not been promoted, Moore gave him a wry smile and said it was pretty simple: the army didn’t make generals out of little hunchbacks—it wasn’t good for the military’s image.

Moore lived alone in a small apartment overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. There was an undeniable, poignant beauty in the endless rows of white markers but it was not a view DeMarco would have wanted to see every day. The colonel’s apartment was filled with pictures of friends in uniform and the memorabilia of campaigns the Pentagon would just as soon forget. On a side table, almost hidden by other photos, was a picture of a young Byron Moore: tanned and shirtless, his body straight and well muscled. He was holding an M16 and squinting into a cruel Asian sun. There was also a picture of Moore at his retirement ceremony. He was in full-dress uniform, his blouse a rainbow of gallantry, a ceremonial saber on his belt. The bitter smile on his lips was as crooked as his spine.

The army had been his life and his love, and Byron Moore ached for it. While he and DeMarco talked he gazed out the window at the white headstones, and DeMarco could imagine him alone—which was almost all the time—anticipating the day his name would be engraved on one of them.

“I hope you’re not doing something to make this guy Estep mad, Joe,” Moore said.

“Not yet,” DeMarco said. “Why? Is he a scary guy?”

“He’s a wacko. He joined the army after high school—volunteered, not drafted. He was a hell of a shot and they used him mostly for long-range recon. They’d send him out by himself, three, four days at a time, and he’d scout the territory. If he saw something to kill, he’d kill it.”

“Is that the wacko part?”

“No, that was his job. But he liked the killing a little too much. You’ve heard about guys who made necklaces out of ears over there?”

DeMarco nodded.

“Estep was a real collector.”

“Is that why he was given the bad-conduct discharge?”

Moore shook his head. “It took a special kind to work the bush alone. When you could find someone with the balls to do it, you put up with a few eccentricities.” Moore paused a moment. DeMarco sensed he was thinking about himself, not Dale Estep, and he wondered about the colonel’s eccentricities.

Moore walked over to his desk and picked up a hand grenade he used for a paper weight. DeMarco knew instinctively that the grenade was still functional and not a harmless souvenir. Squeezing the grenade as if it was one of those spring-loaded hand strengtheners, Moore said, “One day Estep’s on patrol with a squad and they come on a rice paddy. Seven Vietnamese, half of ’em women, tending the plants. The second looie in charge wants to cross the paddy but he can’t tell if the farmers are friendlies or Cong. He tells his guys to spread out, sit tight, and watch for a while.

“Well, this one old guy stops work and wanders off a bit from the others to take a crap. He’s squatting over a trench when a shot rings out. The old guy stands up, screaming, looking down at the place where his balls used to be.”

DeMarco involuntarily shuddered.

“Estep mows ’em all down before they can get to cover. Never misses. Seven shots, seven slopes—faster than you can blink. The lieutenant goes bananas. Starts screamin’ ‘Cease-fire’ like it’s his cousins being killed. Now the lieutenant doesn’t give a shit about the gooks, of course—he’s thinking My Lai. He sees his career going up in smoke every time a body drops. Later, Estep says he didn’t hear the order to stop shooting but he did hear the order, which nobody else heard, to start.”

“And that’s what got him discharged.”

“Yeah, but the paperwork says he was booted out for ‘repeated insubordination.’ There’s no record of what happened in the rice paddy that day.” The colonel flipped the grenade in the air and caught it in his left hand. Winking at DeMarco, he added, “Today that lieutenant wears two stars.”

“If there’s no record of the incident, how did you find out about it?” DeMarco asked. Moore just stared at him. Stupid question.

“One guy who knew Estep over there,” Moore said, “said he was the best shot he’d ever seen in his life. He also said Estep just
loved
killing things. People, monkeys, birds. Any fuckin’ thing. He liked shootin’ and killin’ more than baseball and beatin’ off.”

Thinking of the shooting blind, DeMarco asked, “Do you think a guy with his training could hide pretty well? I mean for a couple of days in a place with people all around him?”

Moore laughed. “Hide pretty well! Let me tell you a little story, Joe. Before my first tour we were running a training exercise against another squad. This squad was trained the same way Estep was, for long-range recon, and their job was to hide from us in an open field and our job was to find them before they killed us with paint balls. The field was two miles long, half a mile wide, and there wasn’t much cover. My guys were pretty good. We found three of them. While we were standing there looking for the fourth guy we get hit, all of us, in the back of the head by paint balls. Hurt like shit, I’ll tell you. Anyway, the fourth guy, we must have walked right over him. When I turned around to see where he was I still couldn’t see him, then all of a sudden the earth opens up and this kid in a gillie suit rises out of the ground. He’s grinning from ear to ear even though the side of his face is a mess, a mass of welts, one eye swollen completely shut. Some bug had been biting the shit out of him the whole time we were searching and this guy never moved.”

Moore tossed the hand grenade into the air again.

“Could Estep
hide
for a couple of days? Hell, Joe, a guy like him could hide in your toilet bowl for a week and you wouldn’t see him.”

19

Emma had seen Eric Mason’s photo on an Internet site, and she was sure he was the man walking toward the black Lexus. He was a handsome six footer with dark hair and a golfer’s tan and eyes that twinkled when he smiled. He was wearing a double-breasted gray suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a maroon tie. He whistled as he walked, jiggling his car keys in time to the beat. He seemed immensely satisfied with the world and his place in it.

Emma was wearing a short red wig and big sunglasses. She was dressed in jeans, a University of Nevada sweatshirt, and hiking boots. She walked toward Mason, timing her pace so that she met him just as he reached his Lexus.

“Excuse me,” Emma said. “Aren’t you Eric Mason, the district attorney?”

Mason smiled at the woman, flashing white, perfectly capped teeth. “Yes, I am,” he said. He was anxious to be off to his club where he was meeting his broker for drinks, but it never hurt to be nice to potential voters. And the woman was attractive, though too old for him he realized looking closer.

“Just wanted to make sure,” Emma said, then she swung the sap she had been holding down at the side of her leg and broke Eric Mason’s perfect nose. Mason spun around at the force of the blow and Emma swung the sap again, hitting him at the base of his skull. Mason collapsed unconscious to the ground, and Emma picked his car keys up from the concrete where he had dropped them. By the time Emma opened the trunk of Mason’s car, another woman was at her side to help place Mason in the trunk.

MASON REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS slowly. He was lying on his back; he wasn’t bound but he had very little room to move. Reaching up, he felt a hard, smooth surface above him, only four inches from his face. He was in a container of some sort, and the air smelled stale, dank . . . earthy. At that instant he realized he was in a coffin, underground, and he began to scream and beat his hands against the lid.

As he screamed he thought he heard a voice in his ear. The voice was telling him to be quiet. He stopped screaming, his panic barely under control, and realized there was an earpiece in his left ear and that’s where the voice was coming from.

“That’s better,” the voice said. He recognized the voice of the red-haired woman who had sapped him in the parking garage.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mason yelled. “Who are you? Let me out of here!”

“What’s wrong, Mr. Mason. Are you claustrophobic?”

She knew he was; Emma had researched the man carefully.

“Goddamnit, let me the fuck out of here!”

“Mr. Mason, the air you’re currently breathing is coming in from a one-inch-diameter tube directly over your head. Look up, Mr. Mason. I’ll shine a light and you’ll see.”

Emma shined a small penlight down the breathing tube. She could see Mason’s eyes; they were enormous, ready to pop right out of his head.

“The breathing tube is open now, Mr. Mason, but since you’re being rude I’m going to put a stopper in it.”

“No!” Mason screamed.

“Your air supply will run out in exactly fifteen minutes. I’ll talk to you again in sixteen minutes.”

“No,” Mason screamed again and watched in horror as the light disappeared and he heard something being shoved into the opening of the breathing tube. For the next few minutes he screamed and pounded on the coffin lid with his hands and kicked upward with his feet.

The voice in his ear said, “You’re using up your oxygen much too fast, Mr. Mason. I don’t think it will last fifteen minutes as I said earlier. Maybe thirteen or fourteen minutes. Can hold your breath for three minutes, Mr. Mason? You don’t smoke, do you?”

Emma knew that he did.

As Mason lay there in the dark, trying not to breathe, trying not to panic, Emma watched him. Above his head was a small fiber-optic cable connected to a video monitor, the cable itself less than a quarter inch in diameter. Emma could record Mason’s demise if she chose to. She shut off the microphone she had been using to communicate with Mason and said to her friend, “You did a good job on this, Sam.”

Emma and Samantha were seated on plastic lawn chairs. They were in a rented garage two miles from Mason’s office. The coffin was lying on the floor at their feet; the earthy odor Mason had smelled upon awakening was caused by a small mound of compost near the breathing tube. Samantha had rigged the coffin with the breathing tube, the video monitor, and the communication system.

“It was pretty simple,” Samantha said. “I had all the stuff in my shop; I didn’t have to buy anything but the box.” Though officially retired from government service Samantha occasionally helped out certain agencies—and old friends—who had special surveillance needs.

“Well, I appreciate it,” Emma said. “Coffee?” she asked, reaching for the thermos by her feet.

“Love some,” Samantha said.

They were just two gals enjoying each other’s company, their pleasure interrupted only occasionally by muffled noises coming from the coffin.

“How’s Richard doing these days?” Emma asked. Richard was Samantha’s husband.

“He’s nuts about fly-fishing at the moment. You know Richard. He becomes absolutely obsessed with whatever his latest hobby is, and we’ve spent every weekend the last two months on some river or lake or beaver pond.”

“A man can have worse hobbies than fly-fishing,” Emma said.

“Yeah, like this asshole,” Samantha said, looking down at the coffin.

Emma checked her watch. Ten minutes to go. She glanced at the video monitor to check on Mason. She hoped he didn’t have a heart attack.

“And how’s your granddaughter doing?” Emma asked.

Samantha had been very precise in her calculation of the volume of air in the coffin, and when Emma checked on Mason ten minutes later he was gasping like a fish out of water and breaking his manicured nails on the lid of the coffin.

Emma pulled the stopper out of the breathing tube and shined the penlight down on Mason’s face.

“Mr. Mason, are you ready to listen now?”

“Yes, yes,” Mason said. “Just tell me what you want. Is this about one of my cases?”

“No, Mr. Mason. This is about a young woman named Julie Fredericks whom you have been harassing relentlessly the last six months. She can’t sleep, she’s lost weight, and she’s taking antidepressants. She’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown—all because you won’t take no for an answer.”

“Julie?” Mason said, seeming genuinely puzzled.

“Yes, Julie,” Emma said. “You are an egomaniac without a conscience, Mr. Mason. And you are afraid of nothing because you know the legal system can’t touch you. You will continue to harass this young woman until she either kills herself or kills you. And killing you would ruin her life.”

“I’ll stop,” Mason said, “I swear to God I will.”

“It never occurred to you that somebody would ignore the law and attack you physically, did it? That’s the kind of thing gangbangers do. You never dreamed it could happen to a powerful man like yourself, and certainly not for something as trivial as stalking a young woman.”

“Please, I promise . . .”

“And it was so easy. I took you out of the parking garage in the building where you work, in a building crawling with law enforcement personnel. Do you still feel invincible, Mr. Mason?”

“Who are you?”

“I’ll get back to you on that in sixteen minutes, Mr. Mason. No, let’s make it seventeen minutes this time.”

Emma inserted the stopper back in the breathing tube, cutting off Mason’s scream.

“How’s Audrey?” Samantha asked.

“She moved to New York.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Emma.”

“She had a job offer she couldn’t pass up, something she’d wanted for a long time.”

“You couldn’t go with her?”

“You know me, Sam. I’m pretty set in my ways. And . . . well, maybe it was for the best.”

Emma waited this time until Mason passed out, then pulled the stopper from the breathing tube. She was afraid for a minute that she might have to open the coffin to resuscitate him but he came to on his own.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Mason?” Emma said.

Mason’s response was to noisily suck in as much air as he could.

“Now to answer your question: Who am I? Well, I belong to a society that was created to help women like Julie Fredericks, women who are abused and terrorized by men. Women who receive no protection from the law because the law is run by men like you. It is a society of women for women, Mr. Mason. A society which saves women like Julie Fredericks from predators like you.”

Emma looked over at Samantha and mugged a face. She sounded like the leather-clad heroine in a comic-book adventure. Samantha grinned back at her and silently mouthed:
You go, girl.

“I promise I’ll leave her alone,” Mason screamed.

“I don’t believe you, Mr. Mason.”

Emma jammed the stopper back into the breathing tube and Mason began to cry. Claustrophobia combined with the thought of being buried alive, further combined with the very real experience of being suffocated was enough to push a brave man over the edge—and Emma knew Eric Mason was not a brave man.

Sixteen minutes later, Emma pulled the stopper from the breathing tube again. She wrinkled her nose; Mason had soiled his expensive suit. It took several minutes before he calmed down enough for Emma to talk to him.

“Mr. Mason,” Emma said, “do you believe we can get to you anytime we want?”

“Yes!”

“Do you believe that some nice woman who looks like a grandmother could walk up behind you with a silenced gun in a shopping bag and put a bullet in your spine?”

“Yes!”

“Do you believe that a young woman who looks like a secretary could gain access to your building and poison the coffeepot right outside your office?”

“Yes!”

“Do you believe a young mother, a very credible young mother, could run you down while you’re jogging and say you tripped and fell under the wheels of her car? Do you believe those things can happen to you now, Mr. Mason?”

“Yes, goddamnit, yes. I believe you!” Mason shrieked.

“I hope so, Mr. Mason, because one of those things
will
happen to you if you ever bother Julie Fredericks again. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I swear to God I’ll never—”

“In ten minutes, Mr. Mason, you’ll hear an alarm clock ring. When you hear the alarm, push up on the lid of the coffin. If you push up the lid before the alarm sounds, you’ll blow off your hands.”

Samantha pressed her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing.

“Your car is parked outside the building you’re in, Mr. Mason. The keys are under the floor mat on the passenger side. And Mr. Mason, after you’ve changed your shit-stained pants, and after you’ve spent a few days in your office with your flunkies telling you what a big shot you are, and after your nose has healed and you look in the mirror and become delighted once again with what you see, do
not
start to think that this experience you’ve just had was some sort of nightmare, that it didn’t really happen. We’ll be back, Mr. Mason, if Julie Fredericks ever hears from you again.”