The Last Word (27 page)

“What a load of crap,” Steve said.

“What did you say?” Mark asked.

“You heard me, Dad. It’s crap. Psychobabble garbage. Meaningless drivel. Melodramatic swill. And none of it’s true.”

“I meant every word of it,” Mark said.

“I’m sure you meant every excruciating, cringe-inducing word,” Steve said. “And you proved your point.”

“That Carter Sweeney is right,” Mark said. “That he and I aren’t so different.”

“You’ve proved just how thoroughly we’ve been manipulated by Carter Sweeney. You most of all,” Steve said. “The reason he invited you out to see him in prison wasn’t to taunt you about what was coming. He wanted to plant the idea in your head that you’re some kind of mirror image of him, to make you wallow in self-pity and despair when his plans finally came to fruition. It wasn’t enough for him to frame us for crimes and put us behind bars. It wasn’t satisfying. Something was still missing. In order for him to truly enjoy it, he had to get you to destroy your family yourself. He wanted you to shoot your children and blow your brains out afterwards. And that’s what you just tried to do. God, I bet he would have given anything to have seen it. Then he would have known that he’d truly broken you.”

“You may be right,” Mark said. “Or maybe he just made me see the truth.”

“Everybody uses everybody,” Steve said. “Everybody manipulates everybody. That’s just a cruel way of saying that we need each other, we rely on each other, and we make sacrifices and compromises in our lives for the people we care about. Relationships are about give-and-take, and believe it or not, Dad, you’re allowed to take, too.”

“I’ve taken more than my share,” Mark said. “Look at what I’ve taken from all of you.”

“We are a family,” Susan said. “That’s what you’ve given us. What have you taken from it? No more and no less than each of us has. Yes, you’ve asked a lot from Jesse and me, maybe too much, and maybe I’m not always happy with it, but that’s what happens in every family.”

“You’re not perfect, Mark. Far from it,” Amanda said. “Believe me, we know that. We talk about it all the time.”

“You do?” Mark said.

“Of course we do,” Amanda said. “Your outrageous demands on our time and your irritating habits are among our favorite topics of conversation.”

“They are?” Mark said.

“That and Lindsay Lohan,” Jesse said.

“We don’t talk about Lindsay Lohan,” Susan said.

Jesse gestured to Steve. “We do.”

“So stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Steve said. “And get us the hell out of here.”

“I wish I could,” Mark said. “But I’ve got nothing left. Everything I’ve relied on before has been taken away from me. I don’t have you. I don’t have access to any medical or law enforcement resources. I don’t even have the money to hire anyone. Every asset I have is going to your legal defense.”

“If this meeting drags on much longer,” Tyrell said, “you’ll have spent it already.”

“You’ve still got what counts the most,” Steve said. “You’re Dr. Mark Sloan.”

“Damn right,” Jesse said. “That’s all we need.”

The vote of confidence was momentarily inspiring, but Mark left the jail feeling no less guilt-ridden, and no better about his chances of prevailing, than he had when he went in.

Tyrell urged Mark to leave matters to him now, to let the battle move to the courtroom.

“There’s no battle to move,” Mark argued. “Up to now, we’ve been attacked. It’s time for us to fight back, and the only weapon we have is the truth.”

“The truth isn’t all that convincing, and it’s going to take too much work to change that.”

“Are you telling me you don’t want to make an effort?”

Tyrell sighed wearily. “Let me explain how this works, Mark. It’s the prosecution that has to do all the hard work. As a defense attorney, my job is to sit there and poke holes in their case, to create a hint of confusion here, a possibility of a mistake there, and throw out a dozen other explanations for every fact they present. Pretty soon all that’s left of their case is a lot of doubt. That’s all it takes to set a guilty man free.”

“They aren’t guilty,” Mark said.

“I keep telling you that it makes no difference,” Tyrell said.

“If my son, and the people I care about, are going to get out of jail, you have to convince the jury that Carter Sweeney and every other murderer I sent to Sunrise Valley are behind this.”

“I’m not saying one word about that conspiracy theory in the courtroom.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“It doesn’t matter whether I do or not. The jury never will. A vast conspiracy of supervillains? It sounds like something out of a comic book. It would take way too much work and destroy whatever credibility I have left trying to get them to believe it. Because it’s unbelievable, even if it is true.”

“What other choice do we have?”

“There’s a much easier way. The key to most defense cases is simply finding fault with everything the other side presents, to keep them scrambling to erase the doubt you’re creating.”

Mark had certainly seen Tyrell do that before. In fact, Tyrell had done it exceptionally well in the Lacey McClure trial. But even so, Mark didn’t think that it was going to be enough this time.

Somehow, Mark had to find some evidence that proved his elaborate conspiracy theory. As things stood now, there wasn’t a single shred of proof to back up any of his claims.

The scariest thing of all, though, was that he had absolutely no idea how to fight back or where to begin his investigation.

He went back to his car and just sat in the driver’s seat, trying to figure out where to go next.

The press would be camped out around his house, so there was no point in going back there. The place would be a mess from the police ransacking and he’d get no peace to think about his next move. And he’d also have the press dogging him from the moment he left the house again.

He couldn’t check into a hotel either. Most of the hotel workers in Southern California were media-savvy and supplemented their incomes by tipping off the tabloid magazines, newspapers, and TV shows whenever a celebrity, no matter how minor, was around.

And there were no friends he wanted to impose on. He didn’t want any more people close to him to get hurt simply by being associated with him.

There was only one option left.

He had to go away.

As he pulled onto eastbound Interstate 10 and left downtown Los Angeles behind him, he couldn’t help feeling like he was being exiled and that his life as he’d known it was over.

 

It was only when he was a couple hundred miles outside Los Angeles that he realized he was heading towards Phoenix and Noah Dent, though he wasn’t sure what he intended to do once he got there.

He stopped for gas and a hamburger in Quartzsite, Arizona, a bleak desert truck stop about twenty miles east of the California border. It was almost midnight and it was still a hundred degrees outside.

Mark wanted to keep going, but he was too tired and was afraid he’d fall asleep behind the wheel. So after eating at the Carl’s Jr., he drove down the barren, dusty road to the Super 8 Motel, where he checked in for the night.

The room was colorful and yet, in its own way, every bit as bleak as the desolate desert landscape off the highway.

Mark undressed, yanked off the flowered bedspread, and got under the scratchy sheets, resting his head on the thin pillows, which smelled like they’d been soaked in chlorine.

He was asleep within seconds and didn’t wake up until almost eleven the next morning. The sheets were on the floor and he was soaked with sweat. The air conditioner was whining in a painful, losing struggle against the intense heat outside.

Mark showered but didn’t realize until he got out that he had no toiletries or fresh clothes. So he smoothed his hair as best he could and tried not to look at his unshaven face in the mirror. He got dressed in his dirty clothes and went down to the lobby, where he snagged a free copy of
USA Today
.

The big story, of course, was the assassination of LA district attorney and mayoral candidate Neal Burnside, presumably by a cop acting on orders from the LAPD police chief, the opposing mayoral candidate.

Mark stuck the newspaper under his arm and decided to put off reading it until he’d had breakfast. He stepped out into the blazing sun and looked across the flat, rocky landscape, the only sound the passing of cars on the interstate behind the motel. The only hint of green he saw was the occasional cactus, all of which seemed to have been gnawed apart by birds or other animals.

The few buildings, spaced widely apart on the street, were mostly boarded up and abandoned until winter. There were a few fast-food franchises that were open, serving the travelers on the interstate, and a small market up the street.

Mark walked to the market and scrounged up all the toiletries he needed. There wasn’t much clothing to choose from, so he bought a multipack of generic boxer shorts and tube socks, two pairs of shorts, and a couple of I GOT MY ROCKS OFF IN QUARTZSITE T-shirts in different colors.

For breakfast, he decided to stay away from the national fast-food places, mostly to avoid any travelers from LA who might recognize him, and wandered into a ratty diner instead, where he and the horseflies were the only customers. He devoured a heaping portion of scrambled eggs and a tall stack of pancakes, washed them down with several cups of coffee, and then returned to his dreary room at the Super 8.

Checkout time at the Super 8 was noon, and since it was well past that now, he bought himself the room for another day, which was fine by him. He was in no hurry to go anywhere. He brushed his teeth and changed into his new clothes while watching the latest news out of LA on CNN.

The present mayor, who’d chosen not to run again for health reasons, had fired Chief Masters with the unanimous backing of the city council and appointed deputy chief Stephanie Craft to take his place as interim chief.

Chief Craft immediately placed the city on high alert, putting every available cop on the street to quell any possible civil unrest in the wake of the assassination and subsequent revelations of police corruption. Plainclothes detectives were being put back into uniform and assigned to patrol in order to create a “strong and visible law enforcement presence” in the city.

She said her number one priority was to maintain order and keep the city from erupting into the widespread rioting, looting, and arson that had followed the Rodney King verdicts. The National Guard was mobilized and ready to assist the LAPD in quelling any civil unrest.

ADA Karen Cross announced that “serious charges” would be filed against Masters “imminently” and that his arrest could come “in the very near future.” Meanwhile, police were searching for Tanis Archer, whom Cross described as a “key figure” in the spying scandal and who could have “vital information” on Burnside’s assassination.

Masters hadn’t dropped out of the mayoral race, but local pundits were expecting the announcement to come at any moment.

Mark was about to switch off the TV when he saw a report that made him freeze. It was from a correspondent with capped teeth and a square jaw stationed at the LA courthouse.

“In the midst of this crippling scandal, the worst that this city has ever faced, convicted killer Carter Sweeney walked into Superior Court for his habeas corpus hearing, accompanied by Tony Sisk, the famed criminal defense attorney whose home and office were allegedly bugged illegally by Chief Masters’s covert operations unit. It is expected that Sweeney’s legal team will argue that his conviction violated due process because of prosecutorial misconduct and fabricated evidence, charges that are likely to seem a lot more credible after the events of the last few weeks. Most of the key investigators and witnesses in the case against Sweeney are now facing corruption and murder charges themselves.”

The footage showed Carter Sweeney walking into the courtroom, accompanied by Tony Sisk and several armed marshals. Sweeney was wearing a suit and tie, his arms handcuffed behind his back.

Just before Sweeney stepped into the courtroom, the camera zoomed in on him. He turned towards the lens, looked directly at Mark, and smiled.

Mark didn’t leave Quartzsite that day. He wandered the dusty streets, his mind as desolate and empty as the desert around him.

He stopped at an outdoor rock market, the agates and quartz spread out on sheets of sagging, sunbaked plywood supported by rusting barrels. The rocks resembled colored glass, were sold by the pound, and were too hot for Mark to touch. They felt like burning embers.

Farther down the road, there was a bookstore that was little more than a collection of tents and camper shells filled with yellowing paperbacks. The proprietor, a scrawny man with crooked teeth and a shaggy beard, was unabashedly naked, wearing only flip-flops to protect his feet.

On any other day, and in a different state of mind, Mark would have found the situation odd or amusing. But he felt disassociated from the world around him, as if he were simply passing through not just Quartzsite but life itself.

He was adrift.

Mark bought a map and a brochure about Quartzsite from the naked bookseller and wandered off to explore his new surroundings. He hadn’t given it any thought; he was just doing it, without any purpose or desire. Perhaps it was merely an excuse to be actively doing something, anything.

He didn’t think about the end of his career at Community General. He didn’t think about his son, who was facing murder charges. He didn’t think about Carter Sweeney, the mastermind behind the destruction of his life.

Instead, he visited the grave of Hadji Ali, a Syrian drover who helped lead the seventy-seven camels that made up the U.S. Army’s ill-fated experimental Camel Military Corps that patrolled the sandy frontier before the Civil War. The camels were ultimately abandoned in the desert to fend for themselves. Ali’s grave was a pyramid of rocks topped with a camel-shaped iron weather vane. The drover had died at age seventy-three, broke and depressed, chasing the last surviving camel into the seemingly endless, rocky desert. Legend has it that they found his body amidst the hardscrabble, his withered, sunbaked arms wrapped around the neck of the dead camel.