Fatal Trust

by Todd M Johnson

  Ian turned back to Maureen. “If you’re really a part of this, you must know your brother tried to kill me, right? Was that always part of the plan?”

  “That bit on the street by the alley was just theater,” Liam jumped in without looking up from the computer. “Those guys I brought in from California were never going to seriously hurt you. Just scare you a little. Keep you off track. It was you who went and ruined Sam’s knee. Maureen knows all about it.”

  “You weren’t in any real danger,” Maureen agreed, smiling reassuringly.

  Ian’s hand brushed the phone in his pocket. He held his breath. In his shock at Willy’s arrival, he hadn’t sent the text to Eldon Carroll and the SWAT team. Everyone was here; the money was about to be transferred. But the FBI’s team at the courthouse hadn’t even left the building yet.

  “I’m not talking about that business,” Ian said, stalling for time. He slid his hand deeper into his pocket and felt for the button to send the text message he’d preprogrammed. “Just to be clear, Maureen, your brother’s lying about that too. What happened by the alley was supposed to get me murdered—if not on the spot, by making it look like I was running with the money so that Callahan would kill me.” He pressed the button and prayed he’d gotten it right. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what Willy—what Liam—did when Callahan and Aaron didn’t oblige. Your brother followed me to Florida and tried to kill me there himself.”

  Maureen looked confused. “What’s he talking about, Liam?”

  “What, now you’re listening to the lawyer?” Liam said, his attention still locked on the computer screen.

  “It was either Liam or you who tried to shoot me,” Ian said more forcefully to Maureen. “Because whoever followed me down to Florida, they knew about the spy hole in the closet wall. That narrows the field.”

  Rory had begun spinning the gold band on his finger frantically. “Don’t do this,” he pleaded to Maureen. “Don’t get mixed up in murder. Walk away, sweetheart. You always followed Liam too much. Don’t follow your brother now. Not with this.”

  Callahan raised his hands. “As much as I appreciate the touching poignancy of the moment, given the public locale chosen for this transaction, let’s get on with it. Even Richard III won’t last forever.”

  Maureen turned deliberately away from her father and Liam, gazing out toward the river.

  “Agreed,” Liam answered the Irishman. “Not feeling much like conversation just now anyway. Let’s do our business before the play ends.” He looked at Ian. “You got the painting?”

  Ian picked up the metal tube from the terrace, where he’d placed it beside him. Removing the end cap, he slid the canvas free and unfurled it in the dim light.

  “Take a close look,” Liam ordered Maureen.

  Moving more uncertainly now, Maureen approached Ian. Using a flashlight app on her phone, she leaned in close to get a good look at the painting. “Yes. It’s genuine. It has the damage on the edges from the original theft.”

  Ian rolled up the painting and slid it back into the cylinder, replacing the end cap.

  Callahan’s eyes were steeped in disbelief. “That’s what this is? You’re tellin’ me Jimmy never sold the last painting?”

  “So it would seem,” Liam said. He stopped working the computer and looked with concern at the Irishman. “Your lawyer here assured my sister that you were ready to exchange the painting for return of the trust money. Was he lying?”

  Even in the low light, Ian could see Callahan’s jaw clenching and his hands fisted in his pockets.

  “I need to know now,” Liam said, his fingers moving toward the keyboard’s Delete button. “If you want my opinion—and I’ve thought about this a lot—I’d say you should take the cash. I’ve already got a buyer lined up for the Rockwell painting, one you’d never find. That painting’s worth a whole lot more to me than it ever will be to you.”

  Callahan’s swagger was gone, replaced by frigid fury. “Aye,” he muttered. “Transfer the money.”

  “Good,” Liam said with relief. “Now, Counselor, pull up the account number you just gave me on your phone. You’ll be able to see the transfer take place.”

  Ian brought up his phone. If he’d pressed the button to alert the SWAT team, it would appear brighter on the screen.

  He looked at that corner of the screen first. The button was dim. He hadn’t actually pushed it yet.

  His stomach dropping, Ian pushed it now. Then he fumbled as slowly as he could to locate the bank transaction page.

  “C’mon,” Callahan growled. “We haven’t got all night.”

  The transfer appeared on the screen. Nine million-plus dollars. He waited a few seconds longer. “I’ve got it,” Ian said at last.

  Maureen took the cylinder with the painting from under Ian’s arm.

  Ian glanced around. Rory looked deflated and lost. Maureen, holding the painting, appeared unsure and nervous. Only Liam seemed calm as he closed his laptop.

  Callahan’s cheeks were crimson.

  The Irishman straightened his back and nodded toward the patio door. Instantly, Aaron the Marine stepped through onto the upper terrace.

  “You should know,” Liam said, looking up at Aaron’s sudden entrance, “that this transaction can be reversed for twenty minutes.”

  Aaron had begun a slow descent of the steps as Callahan’s face grew stony. “What’re ya meanin’?” he asked.

  “Just what I said.” Liam stood, still calm and under control. “If Maureen and I don’t reach a friend of ours in the next ten minutes, a guy who can authenticate the painting and confirm we’re okay, he’ll undo the transaction. It’s the only way we could be sure you’d let us go after the money was sent.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get your money,” Maureen said, her effort at reassurance sounding unconvincing as she watched Aaron descend the steps. “Like Ian said when we met, we don’t want to be looking over our shoulders forever.”

  “So I’m to believe,” Callahan growled, “that you’re gonna traipse away from here with the paintin’, then refrain from undoin’ the money transfer? Is that it? Is that the other lie your brother told ya about how all this was workin’, Maureen, darlin’?”

  Still spinning the ring on his finger, Rory rose and stepped protectively between his daughter and Callahan.

  “You’d never let us leave if it wasn’t set up this way,” Liam said, his voice tightening. “You’re making that obvious right now.”

  A gun appeared in the Marine’s hand, its barrel pointed at the ground. He moved to Callahan’s side.

  “I might’ve done this accordin’ to Jimmy’s wishes,” Callahan added. “Truly. But you all had to foul it up with your schemin’. Rory lyin’ about his past to get a share he doesn’t deserve. The lawyer doin’ a disappearin’ act till Aaron runs him down. Now the paintin’ reappearing. I might’ve done it according to Jimmy’s plan. But we’ll certainly do it my way now.”

  “Sean,” Rory said, “you can’t shoot everybody. Not here.”

  “I’ll do as I please, where I please,” Callahan snapped, pulling a small handgun from his jacket pocket. Callahan held it low and pointed to the emergency exit to his right. “This way.”

  “The transaction will reverse in less than six minutes,” Liam said, the alarm creeping deeper in his voice.

  “What can be reversed can be reversed again,” Callahan replied in a murderous tone.

  It was all falling apart, Ian thought. And the FBI’s team still had to be minutes away. Growing desperate, he began raising a hand to his forehead.

  The patio door opened once more. A thin woman stepped through and began walking ethereally down the steps.

  It took Ian a moment for it to register that the woman was Martha. And that in her hand his mother held the gun she’d given him to destroy just nine days before.

  “What are you doing here?” Ian cried out. “Drop the gun.”

  “Aye, drop it,” Callahan said
soothingly. “Ya don’t need to get into this now, Martha. It’s all under control.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Ian pleaded, turning to the Irishman. “It’s her Alzheimer’s. Let me talk to her.”

  “Rory,” Martha said, ignoring both Ian and Callahan and looking to the wraithlike figure standing beside Maureen. “It’s been so long.”

  Some strange quality in her words brought silence to the patio. Martha stopped her slow descent of the steps and glanced around.

  “No, wait,” she went on. “It hasn’t been so long, has it, Rory? You came by the house the other day. When I was in my garden.”

  Rory shook his head. “No, Martha, I didn’t.”

  “Of course you did. Though you looked so young.” Her gaze drifted again, stopping on Liam. “Why, no. It was you who came by and spoke to me in the garden. Twice.”

  Liam stood still and quiet.

  Aaron’s gun barrel began to rise slowly. Martha’s head turned, and she gripped him in a stare.

  “Do you think I’d miss at this distance, young man?” she asked firmly. “My Connor taught me better than that. We practiced often after we married, when we still worried about what Father or Sean might do.”

  Aaron’s gun stopped its upward arc.

  She returned her scrutiny to Rory. “You look so worn. It has been a weight, hasn’t it? It’s weighed terribly on me too. Just like it did on my Connor.”

  “What’s that, Martha?” Rory said quietly, though his eyes seemed to understand.

  “The security guard we killed that night. We all carry the guilt for that young man’s death. And Father making you burn the body . . . a terrible thing to force a seventeen-year-old boy to do. Although he bears the real guilt, don’t you see? It was Father who brought us to that gallery, who searched out the children he’d left confused and haunted and alone through the years, and brought us together for that dreadful night. And we all came. We came to prove something to the great Jimmy Doyle, didn’t we? To our father.”

  “I suppose,” Rory said in agony.

  Ian felt his world collapsing. It was one more disclosure—added to the words of Ed McMartin, the revelation at McMartin’s house, and the shock of Liam’s identity.

  One revelation too many to bear.

  “Mom!” he cried out. “It couldn’t have been you at the art robbery.”

  Martha looked at Ian with intense sadness. “Oh, sweet Ian, my darling boy. I wish I could have told you and Adrianne. Connor and I both wanted to. But we couldn’t. Not until we could make things right.”

  Rory was shaking his head again. “Martha, you’re right. Dad brought us there that night and I’ve hated him for it. But I pulled the trigger.”

  “You pulled the trigger,” Martha said, “but you didn’t shoot anybody. I wish we’d spoken of it. If we’d seen each other alone, even once, in all these years. It hasn’t been an easy thing for me to carry either.”

  “Ya need to back out of this, Martha,” Callahan insisted with narrowed eyes. “Do it now and I’ll see to it your boy gets his fee from the trust.”

  Rory stiffened, looking at Callahan, then back to Martha. “You’re wrong,” the gaunt man said to Martha. “I shot the guard twice.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Our father never taught you how to shoot; you told me so yourself. He kept you out of his business until the robbery. You told me that too. And I could see it when you fired that night at the gallery, because I was behind you. Your shots were high. I shot high too—deliberately. There was only one marksman at the gallery. Don’t you remember how he bragged that night how he’d handled a gun since he was a young boy in Belfast?”

  Rory turned to Callahan. “You told me I killed him. You told Dad too.”

  Breaking through a fog, Ian recalled Eldon’s SWAT team on the bridge, felt their eyes on them like ants on his skin. They’d be watching, he realized. Ever since he sent the text, they’d have been alerted and watching the patio. Ready to act if people were in danger.

  And there stood his mom, a gun in her hand.

  Callahan’s voice was ragged with fury when he broke the silence that had fallen over the patio again. “This chat is over,” he muttered.

  Aaron’s weapon rose again. To Ian’s horror, Martha’s gun came up too.

  “It’s time, isn’t it, Sean?” she said calmly as her gun reached shoulder height. “It’s time we set things right.”

  “Don’t!” Ian screamed. He put his hands on the concrete terrace at his knees and vaulted toward Martha.

  9:59 P.M.

  STONE ARCH BRIDGE, MINNEAPOLIS

  In the small utility tent set up on the bridge, Brook held a pair of binoculars tightly to her eyes, her attention focused on the Guthrie Theater patio. The FBI SWAT chief at her elbow was watching the scene at the theater through night-vision goggles. Both Brook and the chief wore earbuds, linked to the SWAT team coming from the courthouse. Brook could hear the breathing of the two snipers seated directly in front of them.

  Since the team at the courthouse had radioed that they’d received Ian’s signal, the snipers’ scoped weapons had extended through narrow embrasures aimed at the Guthrie patio, keeping an eye on the same scene Brook was seeing unfold through her own gap in the tent’s side. At the moment, all eyes were trained on a large man—the Marine, she guessed—coming down the steps on the far side of the patio area.

  Then a gun emerged from the man’s belt.

  The SWAT team from the police station could still be minutes away, Brook realized, her alarm growing.

  The action on the patio froze. Ian’s hand, which had been rising toward his forehead, halted in midair. Aaron stopped beside Callahan and turned, his gun still pointed at the ground.

  What had changed? Brook raised her binoculars to the upper section of the patio.

  Another figure came out of the theater building. Brook adjusted the binoculars to focus on the face of the woman walking down the steps.

  It was Martha. And in her hand was a gun.

  “Chief, we’ve got another target,” the nearest sniper at her feet said evenly.

  “I see her,” the chief answered. “Female. With a weapon.”

  “Yes, sir. Do you want me to leave the tall one at the end of the patio and switch to her?”

  “No, wait!” Brook said. “She’s not a target.”

  “She’s armed so she’s a target,” the chief confirmed. He nudged the man with his knee. “Yes. Switch to the new target. Sniper two, you’ve still got the other armed man?”

  “Yes, sir,” the second sniper replied.

  This couldn’t be happening. “That woman, she’s got Alzheimer’s,” Brook pleaded. “She probably doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “She’s got a gun, Counselor. She’s a target.”

  Another long minute or two slipped by. Brook felt paralyzed, helpless.

  “We’ve got a weapon rising,” the first sniper announced. His voice intensified in pitch. “Now we’ve got two with weapons rising. Repeat, both armed targets are raising their weapons.”

  “Follow orders,” the chief told him. “Fire if they go parallel.”

  Brook watched with mounting horror as the Marine’s arm straightened. She shifted the view. Martha’s gun hand was nearly at shoulder height.

  “No!” she shouted, letting the binoculars fall as she lunged toward the sniper’s back.

  A rifle cracked in the narrow tent, the shot echoing out over the river.

  Then the second sniper’s weapon roared and kicked—the same instant Brook’s hands reached the hard surface of his bulletproof vest.

  48

  SUNDAY, JUNE 17

  11:13 A.M.

  NORTH MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER, ROBBINSDALE

  SUBURBAN MINNEAPOLIS

  Ian gritted his teeth as he trudged along the hospital corridor. Even walking gingerly, each movement sent fresh agony through his left shoulder, held tight to his chest with a bound sling.

  He reach
ed his mother’s room and took a deep breath to dispel the pain before entering.

  Flowers lining tables and along the floor were brightened by sunlight streaming through the windows. He recognized Brook’s large bouquet and another from Brook’s parents. Dennis Hoy’s. A large bunch of flowers from Talk Show. A larger one still from an unnamed benefactor Harry insisted was Anthony Ahmetti.

  There was a smaller bouquet of lilies set apart on the windowsill that hadn’t been there the day before.

  His mother lay propped on the bed, gazing at the flowers as though staring through her living room window at her own flower garden. Ian took a seat on the edge of the bed and reached out for her hand.

  “Mom,” he said, using the same words that began each of his visits, “you’re going to be fine. The bullet that went through me went through you too. You were very lucky. We both were.”

  A chilling scene swept through his mind: of the cold cement terrace beneath his chest; the Marine like a crumpled doll at Sean Callahan’s feet; the SWAT team roaring through the patio door; his mother lying pale and still at his side. “You’re going to be fine,” he repeated as if to confirm this for himself.

  He waited. As with each day before, she didn’t respond.

  “I spoke with Greg,” Ian went on, naming their neighbor across the backyard. “He said to give you his best. He said he’d take care of the yard and gardens until you get back.”

  His mother still didn’t stir. Her hand lay limp in his own.

  “You know, Adrianne’s going to be here on Monday. She’s gotten a few weeks off from her clinic and will be with you. She said a trauma like you suffered can be a setback, but it doesn’t have to be the end, Mom. You have a lot of good days ahead.”

  Still nothing.

  Ian sighed and looked away. “You know, I thought all my life that Dad was a quiet, calm man. Steady but no sparks. Did his work well but never took chances. I had no idea how wrong I was. He knew, didn’t he? He knew all about you and the robbery. Prima was right when he tagged Dad’s connection to Doyle the year you married—because when you married Dad, he married everything you were carrying. The connection to Jimmy Doyle, the guilt from that night in the art gallery, the shame of it all. He did it with eyes wide open. Rory told me Dad had ‘fallen for his sister.’ I thought he was being sarcastic since I thought he didn’t have one. But he was talking about you. Dad fell for you and spent his life protecting you and everybody else around him. Including Katie. He loved you that much.”