Three To Get Deadly (64 page)

Mason took a deep breath and shoved his hands in his pockets to keep him from shaking Riley until he made some sense.

"What in the hell are you talking about? People are getting killed for those damn disks, and you're trying to tell me it's all a big mistake? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"Son, no one's getting killed for the skin flicks. Now, Johnny Mathis—that's a different story entirely," he said.

"Johnny Mathis?" Kelly asked.

"Yup. It's not a commercial CD, like an album you'd buy. Somebody copied the songs onto a blank CD."

"They put it in a CD case from a Johnny Mathis album to make it look like the real deal," Sandra added.

"I was playing it on a boom box while I was fiddling with these other disks," Riley continued. "Right smack in the middle of my wife's favorite tune, he hit that high note—kinda like a warble—then it cut out. Nothing. So I got to wondering about Mr. Mathis and I decided to run some tests on his CD."

"Riley found two documents that had been imaged onto the CD. We printed them out," Sandra said, handing copies to Blues, Kelly, and Mason.

Each document consisted of a single page. The first listed the shell companies O'Malley had set up to borrow money from his bank and identified the owners. Sullivan owned half of each of the companies. O'Malley owned the other half. The document would have made St. John's case against him.

"These must be the documents Sullivan wanted you to destroy," Kelly said to Mason.

"I don't think he wanted me to destroy anything. I think he was just testing me to find out which side of the line I walked on. There was no way he could know if every copy of this had been destroyed. Especially if it had been imaged onto a CD. Besides, he wasn't the only one who knew about this. O'Malley knew. They were partners. What's on the other page?"

"Another list," Sandra said. "I recognize the names of some of the companies involved in the fixtures deals. But there's also a list labeled 'accounts.' Each account is a combination of letters and numbers. I don't know what they mean."

Kelly scanned the second document. "It's a combination of bank account numbers and passwords. Offshore banks in the Cayman Islands use the codes to identify account holders and give them access to their accounts without using names. When I was with the FBI, we spent a lot of time breaking these codes down so we could trace laundered money."

"So break these down," Mason said. "It's the key to the fixtures deals. We'll follow the money and find out who started all of this."

"It's not that simple. You just can't hold the numbers up to a mirror and read them backward. But this is another reason for me to go to Chicago. I've got friends there who can decipher them."

Kelly led the way to the Home Style Cafe on the west side of the square for breakfast. The restaurant was filled with regular customers who made it part of their daily ritual. The men in denim shirts and blue jeans were stretching their last cup of coffee before starting their day. The storefront was dusky brick, unchanged for the last forty years. Kelly and Mason slid side by side into a booth while Sandra, Blues, and Riley chose the counter.

"Why do you think Sullivan imaged those documents onto a CD with Johnny Mathis?" Kelly asked.

"He was hiding them in plain sight. Anyone who found the CD case would see the Johnny Mathis label and think it was nothing important. If they opened the case and saw a disk without a Johnny Mathis label, they might get suspicious and listen to it. There was enough music on the CD to make most people assume there wasn't anything else on it, but it took a true fan like Riley to listen long enough to find the documents."

"I respect the man and his music," Riley said from his seat at the counter.

Mason continued. "Sullivan knew that St. John had him cold when St. John served the subpoena on him. The fixtures documents were his trump cards. Sullivan was going to offer a trade to St. John. Somebody else found out. They must have been looking for the documents when they broke into Sullivan's house last month."

"And Harlan was going to try his own version of let's make a deal. Now they're both dead," Kelly said.

The sun flattened out against the water-spotted window. Kelly rested her elbow on the ledge, chin cupped in her hand, her eyes set on some distant place. The sad weariness Mason had first sensed in her had spread in the hours since her cabin burned. She hadn't talked about it and didn't have to. It was the last link to her father. He'd died long ago, but now he was truly gone. Mason tried to comfort them both by holding her close. She pulled away, her melancholy smile telling him that he was not what she needed right now.

Breakfast passed quietly. She explained that her chief deputy would handle the investigation while she was away. Another deputy would drive her home to clean up and pack and then take her St. Louis, where she'd catch a Southwest flight to Chicago, getting there in time for lunch. She left the tip and said good-bye.

There was a Holiday Inn two blocks away with a vacancy, and Mason's plastic was still good. He showered and slept past noon, too tired for nightmares. It was Friday and he counted on the latest set of clothes he'd just purchased to last through the weekend or his insurance settlement wouldn't see him past Labor Day.

By two o'clock, he was all dressed up with no place to go. He drifted back to the courthouse and Kelly's office, figuring that Blues and Sandra would turn up eventually. Nobody told him not to, so he camped out in Kelly's chair.

He was about to go looking for Blues when a file clerk walked in with a fax from the community blood bank. Like all faxes, it had a bold
Confidential
stamp across the cover sheet. Like all people who were tired of getting shot at, Mason ignored it.

The second sheet was a copy of the blood bank's laboratory test from September 1987 for Richard Sullivan. The lab data were medical hieroglyphics to him, but the narrative report couldn't have been clearer. It was 95 percent certain that Richard Sullivan was the natural father of an unnamed child, then aged ten. The mother was Meredith Phillips. The report was addressed to Dr. Kenton Newberry of Rogersville, Kansas.

Mason finished writing the information on a yellow pad just as Blues and Sandra came through the door. Judging from the creases in their jeans, they'd all been on the same schedule.

"Trans-Am's got new wheels and is running fine," Blues reported.

"Well, Chief, got any bright ideas for the rest of our summer vacation?" Sandra asked.

"Yep. We're going home."

"Pardon me. But unless I'm missing something, we came down here to hide from Camaya—and now we're going back to Kansas City!" Sandra said. "Should we just paint a target on our backs or would a
Shoot Here, Stupid
sign be better?"

"We haven't done a bang-up job of hiding. Besides, he won't look for us there if he thinks we're still down here. We're the only ones who'll know where we're going and we won't tell anybody, now, will we?"

The mildly accusing tone came out without premeditation.

"No, we won't!" Sandra said, bristling at the implication in Mason's voice. She turned and walked out.

"Hey, where are you going?" he called to her.

"To the bathroom. Do I need an escort?" she replied over her shoulder.

"What's that all about, man?" Blues asked when she was out of range.

"I don't really know. I didn't intend for it to sound that way. But she sure took it personally. It just seems kind of odd that Camaya found us so easily."

"I told you he'd come looking for us, and he'd figure you were with Kelly."

"Yeah, but how did he know where Kelly was?"

"She's the sheriff, for crissakes! You look for her at the sheriff's office."

"Well, unless he keeps tabs on ex-FBI agents, how did he know she was the sheriff down here? St. John didn't even know that."

The more Mason talked, the more he warmed up to this latest thread. "Even if he knew Kelly was in the Ozarks, the location of her cabin was practically a state secret. Somebody sure as hell had to tell him how to get to it. And back at the warehouse, Sandra didn't bat an eye when that black Escalade pulled up."

Blues got his clenched-jaw cop look as he chewed on the possibilities. "And she didn't complain about being stuck down in that basement all night with Riley."

"Maybe I'm just grabbing at shadows. But we don't know where Camaya is or how much help he's got. If he stayed in the area, chances are he'll watch the roads back to KC. I've got a different route in mind."

Mason told Blues about the blood-bank results before showing him a road map he'd dug out of Kelly's desk. They were about 180 miles south and east of Kansas City. They would take Highway 54 west across the state line into Kansas to Highway 169, then head north on 169 to Rogersville, a small town about sixty miles south of Kansas City.

It was roughly the same distance to Rogersville from the lake as from the lake to Kansas City. It would take three to four hours to get there. Mason didn't know what they would find there on a Friday night, but he doubted anyone would be watching for them along those roads. They agreed to say nothing to Sandra about their route. They would stop in Rogersville for dinner. Mason hadn't gotten any further in his thinking when Sandra reappeared.

"Okay, guys. I'm ready," she said, all trace of hostility gone. "I hope your moms told you to go to the john before going on the highway."

"You betcha!" Mason said. "Come on, Blues; I'm not stopping every ten minutes for you."

As they were walking out of the bathroom, Mason noticed a pay phone tucked in an alcove between the sinks and the urinals. He told Blues to take Sandra to the car and he would meet them in a minute. He pretended to have forgotten something in Kelly's office, and on the way back out stopped to talk to the sheriff's dispatcher, a greasy-haired kid, probably not yet twenty-one and barely winning the war on acne.

"Were you on duty last night when Sheriff Holt called in from the cabin?"

"Sure was! That must have been one hell of a fire!"

"Lucky thing the troops knew how to get there. I never could've found the way on my own."

"Shit, man!" he said laughing. "Nobody knew how to get to that cabin. The sheriff had to damn near talk the lead deputy all the way in. We all knew she had the cabin, but she was mighty private about where it was."

"No kidding?" Mason's stomach tightened with a cold shiver, and he changed the subject. "How do you keep in touch with Sheriff Holt when she's on the road?"

"Age of the cell phone, man."

"Mind giving me the number? I may need to get in touch with her."

"No problem," he said as he scratched it on a piece of paper and handed it to Mason.

Mason started to leave and stopped. "Just one last thing. I was wondering, do you have any pay phones around here?"

"Yeah. There's one in each john."

"Thanks," Mason said and headed for the car.

Sandra was in the front seat, riding shotgun.

Mason couldn't explain his sudden suspicion of Sandra, yet he couldn't shake it, and her passive aggressive response didn't help. He would have preferred ducking her usual barrage of sarcasm and threats than the uncomfortable silence that filled the car. When he turned to look at her, she made a point of staring out the window, not bothering to ask why Blues was ignoring all the highway signs pointing to Kansas City.

Looking back, he realized his doubts began when she told him about her medical background. She knew enough to poison Sullivan. At the warehouse, Camaya threatened him, not her. Tying her up could have been for show, her escape planned rather than fortuitous. And Camaya couldn't have found them without somebody telling him where to look. He wondered if paranoia made him a clear thinker or just paranoid.

They chased the afternoon sun through the rolling, wooded Ozark hills, across the state line, and into the grassy knolls of eastern Kansas. Highway 54 beckoned westward to the broad, endless plains.

Mason had once driven that road all the way to Liberal, Kansas. Eight hours of seamless prairie, thinking about the pioneers who had dared to cross that land 150 years ago. There must have been moments when they looked in every direction, finding nothing to reveal where they were, where they'd been, or where they were going. Swallowed by their surroundings, they had to press on or go mad where they were.

He was beginning to understand what that felt like. He couldn't go back, and it was impossible to know whether he was headed the right way. By the time he found out, it could be too late.

An hour and a half later, Blues pulled into the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Rogersville, Kansas. After his diet the last few days, those red and white stripes and tantalizing choices of original or extra crispy beckoned Mason.

A weather-beaten phone book dangled on a steel cable from beneath a pay phone planted in a corner of the asphalt parking lot. While Blues and Sandra went inside, Mason lingered at the phone, checking the local listings. There was no listing for Dr. Kenton Newberry. Meredith wasn't listed either. She may have married, died, or moved away. There were ten different listings under Phillips. He tore out the page, hoping that one of them might be her family.

Blues and Sandra sat opposite each other in a booth. He was eating and she was watching. Mason slid in next to Blues and reached for a chicken thigh. That was as close to dinner as he got.

"Okay, Boy Scouts. I've been good and kept my mouth shut. But I've had enough. Either I get some answers, or I'm out of here."

She didn't have to raise her voice. Sandra had one of those tones that sliced right through you.