by Lauren Carr
“End of the line for the lovebirds.” With yet another laugh, Officer Sauer unlatched his seatbelt and threw open the door.
In contrast, his no-nonsense partner, Stan, turned off the police car and opened the car door like he was making a routine call.
Officer Sauer yanked open David’s door. “Ever seen the East River before, Chief? Now’s your chance.” He grabbed David by the right arm to drag him out.
“Don’t move,” David hissed at Dallas.
Laughing like a hyena at the slow, deliberate pace in which his latest victim was climbing out of the safety of the police cruiser, Officer Sauer was unprepared when David spun around to deliver a spiked blow with his left fist to the right side of his throat. Two of the spikes punctured his neck. He was still reeling from the shock when David reached down to the officer’s midsection to grab the grip of his gun, which was still tucked in his waistband, and pulled the trigger, firing a shot through Sauer’s lower abdomen.
In one smooth movement, David ripped the weapon from Officer Sauer’s pants and fired off three shots across the roof of the cruiser at Stan, who was still in the process of drawing his weapon in response to David’s attack. One of David’s shots hit Stan in the neck, and another hit him between the eyes—but not before the officer managed to get one shot off.
David felt a burning sensation not unlike that of a branding iron across his left upper arm. Aware of movement at his feet, he turned to see that although Sauer was wounded, he was struggling to extract his gun from his holster.
“No, you don’t,” David said before firing two shots into his head.
Officer Sauer dropped down to the pavement. Blood flowed freely from his wounds and pooled around him.
All David could see was the badge pinned to the officer’s chest. I shot a cop. One of my own. A brother. Two brothers.
“This one’s buzzard bait,” Dallas said, her announcement breaking through his thoughts. “How ’bout that one?”
Stunned at what he had done, David could only stare down at the police badge shining off of the late morning sunlight. Later, he would not remember seeing Dallas come around the car, extract the ninja spikes from his hand, and kneel down next to Officer Sauer to check for a pulse.
“They’re both dead.” She took Officer Sauer’s gun from his holster and handed it to David. “You’re gonna be needin’ this.”
His hands were so numb that David could barely feel the cold metal when he took the weapon. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants and covered it up with his sweater. “Take his spare magazines, too.” His own voice sounded like it was in a fog.
She was already handing him the magazines, which he slipped into his pockets. Seeing the bloody tear through the left sleeve of his sports coat, she gasped. “You’ve been shot.”
Squinting at her, David shook his head. He didn’t understand what she’d said until she started poking through the hole in his sleeve to examine the wound.
“Looks like Stan managed to clip you before you took him out,” she said. “You might be needin’ a couple of stitches. Right now, we need to get outta here.”
She dropped back down next to the dead police officer to search his pockets. She extracted the backup weapon that he had taken from David earlier. While David placed his weapon back in his ankle holster, Dallas removed Officer Sauer’s backup weapon and placed it, holster and all, around her own ankle.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” David asked.
With a grin, she unholstered the thirty-two semiautomatic, extracted the magazine to check the rounds, shoved the magazine back into the grip, and then checked the sights. “I wouldn’t be a real Texan if I didn’t know how to shoot a gun.” She slipped the weapon into its holster and pulled down her pant leg. “Sugar, police are gonna to be here faster than a prairie fire with a tail wind,” she said while urging him to his feet. “Since we don’t know which ones are the bad guys, we need to go underground till we get it figured out.” Clutching her shoulder bag close to her with one arm, she tugged his arm with the other.
David took one last look at Officer Sauer. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Grabbing him by both arms, Dallas forced him to look at her. Her tone was gentle yet firm. “You had no choice, hon. They were gonna kill us.”
Far in the distance, David heard police sirens growing nearer.
“It’s time to blow this pop stand, partner,” she said. “Now!”
Forcing one foot in front of the other, David allowed her to lead him down the river and through an alleyway back toward the city—away from the approaching police sirens.
Chapter Sixteen
“Mac, are you going to finish those fries?” Ed Willingham eyed the untouched pile of fries on the plate across the table from him.
Absorbed in the research notes that Letty Bolger had e-mailed to him, Mac had only eaten half of his BLT sandwich and hadn’t touched the fries that room service had brought up for their lunch.
Like a couple of vultures, Ed was eying the uneaten fries while Gnarly was focusing his attention on the leftover sandwich.
“Take them.” Without taking his eyes from the laptop, Mac shoved the plate in Ed’s direction.
Not to be ignored, Gnarly jumped up to put his front paws on the table and snag the sandwich, leaving the fries for the lawyer.
“Did you see what he did?” Ed gasped.
“You need to learn to move faster, Ed,” Mac said. “How old was Audra when she disappeared?”
“Forty-eight,” Ed answered without hesitation. The information he had acquired from his sources in the police department was still fresh in his mind. Although he was unable to get access to the nitty-gritty details of the case until a client of his was charged, he was about to get enough details to help Mac. “She would have been fifty this year. Phil is twenty-eight. Dallas just turned twenty-four.”
“My daughter is the same ages as Dallas.”
Mac recalled many discussions with Audra Walker in which they’d compared notes on the two girls who, at the time he worked with Audra, had both been young women yearning to spread their wings and fly from the nest. Audra was worried about Dallas, who, she confessed, had inherited her independent spirit. “I swear that if her pappy didn’t keep a tight rein on that girl, she’d be wilder than an acre of snakes,” Audra had said.
“Finding anything in that file, Mac?” Ed asked him.
“Audra’s Romeo and Juliet are Clint Brown and Kimberly Castillo,” Mac said. “She actually managed to get copies of the police reports for their suicides. It happened thirty-two years ago in Marfa, Texas—that’s in Western Texas, near Big Bend. Kimberly Castillo’s father owned a huge ranch outside of Marfa. Clint’s father was crushed to death when a tractor rolled over on him. Brown’s widow claimed it was faulty equipment. She filed a wrongful death suit and lost. There was bad blood …” His voice trailed off, and he clicked the arrow key to move on to the next page. “Dallas already told me all this.”
He continued clicking until he came to more witness accounts. “Here it is.”
“What is?” Ed stopped eating to ask.
“A witness statement from Audra Sinclair,” Mac said. “Sinclair was Audra Walker’s maiden name. She was there. It happened up at Miner’s Bluff, a lover’s lane that the kids used to frequent to make out—”
“Nobody uses that term anymore, Mac,” Ed said. “Now it’s ‘hooking up.’”
“Whatever,” Mac replied. “Anyway, it was after midnight, after the prom, and the place was jammed full of kids—couples—otherwise engaged. Audra says in her statement that she was there with her date, Dan Something, when suddenly they heard this loud screaming. Audra claims she jumped up to see what the screaming was about and saw Clint’s car, engulfed in flames, going over the cliff.”
“What a way to remember your prom,” Ed said.
“When the parents were notified, they found notes in both Clint’s and Kimberly’s bedrooms stating that they had a suicide pact. Since they couldn’t be together in life, they wanted to be together in death.”
“What a nightmare,” Ed said.
“It gets worse for Horace Castillo, Kimberly’s father,” Mac said. “A week later, after the memorial service for his only daughter, his only son and his girlfriend were murdered when they walked in on a burglary at their home. Bludgeoned to death.” He pushed the image of losing both his grown son and daughter in such a horrific manner from his mind. “Horace Castillo died of a heart attack less than six months later.”
Mac clicked to the next page. “Crime-scene report. Both bodies were burnt beyond recognition. Kimberly was found in the car. Clint’s body was found at the bottom of the cliff, seventy-five feet from the vehicle.” He paused and then muttered, “Pretty far away, if you ask me.” He continued to read from the report. “Identification was based on eyewitness reports from their friends who saw the car going over the cliff with Kimberly and Clint inside.”
“Not DNA?”
“This was over thirty years ago, Ed,” Mac reminded him. “DNA wasn’t available to a small town in a rural Texan county. Small sheriff’s department.” He double-checked the report. “They didn’t use dental records for either one of them.”
Looking across the table at Ed, Mac said, “That’s what drew Audra to this story. Suppose it wasn’t a suicide pact? All these teenagers were focused on what teenagers are focused on at prom night. The witnesses know that these young lovers are going to be apart and that they’re upset about it. Kimberly screams to get their attention so they’ll see Clint’s car going over the cliff.” Raising his voice, he asked, “Why was the car on fire before it went over the cliff?”
“If the gas tank ignited due to the crash, it would have caught fire after the car had gone over,” Ed said with a nod of his head.
“They set it on fire because they needed the bodies to be burned beyond recognition,” Mac said. “Two bodies, a young woman’s and a young man’s, are found at the crime scene. Suicide notes are found. Between the notes and the kids’ statements, no one questioned that it was Kimberly and Clint. Kimberly comes from a wealthy family. She knows the combination to her father’s safe. During the service, they break in to steal the money, planning to blame it on a burglar taking advantage of the family’s being away. And then her brother walks in.”
“They had already killed two people,” Ed said. “The young man and woman found at the bottom of the cliff.”
“They kill Kimberly’s brother and girlfriend, plant the murder weapon to blame a field hand, clean out her father’s safe, and run away to start a new life,” Mac said.
“If Audra believed they weren’t dead, why didn’t she ask to have the bodies exhumed and then check the dental records?” Ed asked.
“Based on what I just told you, did she have enough to warrant a subpoena to do it?” Mac asked. “If someone came to me asking to exhume my dead son’s body to prove he’d killed four people in order to fake his death and pull off a burglary, I’d say no. I wouldn’t want to know.”
“They were Audra’s friends,” Ed said. “If they’re still alive—”
“She had to have picked up their trail at ZNC.” Mac slapped the laptop shut. “That’s where we’re going to start.” He picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call David and tell him and Dallas to meet us in the lobby.”
David lost track of how many blocks Dallas had led him down. Since he was unfamiliar with New York City, he allowed her to lead him block after block, turning one corner after another and crossing multiple busy intersections. Once they were out of earshot of the emergency vehicles and among the crowds of the city, Dallas yanked David into an alley between two shops.
“We need to get you cleaned up.” Dropping her handbag to the filthy ground, she stripped off her trench coat and proceeded to unbutton the white shirt Ed Willingham had given to her. “Take off that sweater. That bullet hole and blood’ll be drawin’ attention to you.”
Her reference to his wound made the sting from where the police officer’s bullet had grazed his arm register with his brain. Involuntarily, he grabbed his arm.
With the white shirt Dallas was wearing hanging open and revealing David’s undershirt underneath it, she knelt down to rummage through her bag. “I have a first aid kit in here. Nothing fancy, but it should have an antibiotic to clean you up and a bandage to stop the bleeding.” Opening up the plastic case, she extracted a tube and a bandage. “Don’t be shy, sweetie. We need to clean up your jacket and ditch that bloody sweater.”
After shrugging out of his sports coat, David pulled the sweater off over his head and tossed it to the ground.
Taking in his firm, slender build, she rose to her feet and began tending to the deep cut across his bicep. The rubbing of the sweater across it had made it start bleeding once again. She ripped open an antiseptic towelette with her teeth, spit the torn paper out on the ground, and went to work cleaning the blood from in and around the wound.
“I forgot to thank you”—she said in a low voice—“for back there. For savin’ me.”
Looking over his shoulder into her light-brown eyes, he shrugged. “They were going to kill me, too.”
“Not if you had just let them take me away, which I was gonna let them do. I had no idea they weren’t real cops.”
“They were real cops,” David told her from over his shoulder. “Real and dirty. The worst kind.”
Pressing up against him, she wrapped both hands around his arm. “Thing is, darlin’, you saw that somethin’ was fishy from the beginnin’. I didn’t. What clued you in?”
“Stan was talking on his cell phone, not on his radio.”
“Could’ve been a personal call?”
“Yeah, but his body language told me that it was all business,” David said. “It struck me that things weren’t right.” He shifted away from her and pulled his arm around his body in an attempt to look at the cut. “I think it’s clean enough.”
Reminded of his wound, she tore her gaze from his blue eyes to put the ointment on the cut and to bandage it. “I have a sewin’ kit in my bag.”
“Is there anything you don’t have in that bag?”
“Nope.” With his sports coat tucked under her arm, she knelt down to dig through her bag for the kit. “All we need to do is tape up the bullet hole in the sleeve then it won’t be so noticeable.” Uttering a cry of success, she extracted the kit from the bag and held it up for him to see. “This’ll do us for now.”
While David dressed in Ed’s white button-down shirt, she mended the tear in his sports coat. She then searched for a way to dispose of the bloody sweater. Spotting a trash bin, she fished multiple shopping bags out and hid the sweater inside one bag after another before burying it under several large green garbage bags.
By the time she had finished, David had redressed and was working on a plan of action. “First thing we need to do is change our appearances.” He took out his cell phone and removed the battery. “Security cameras in the cruiser will show them exactly what happened. Our pictures are going to be all over the news, and everyone in the city is going to be looking for us.”
Looking up from where she was fastening up her trench coat, Dallas nodded her head to tell him that she understood.
“Once they identify us, they’re going to try tracking us by the GPS in our cells,” he said. “Take the battery out of your phone, and put it in your purse.” He slipped his phone’s battery into his pocket. “We need to get a burner phone so I can call Mac and let him know what’s gone down.”
Dallas was already digging through her bag.
“Unfortunately, I only have about forty dollars in cash,” David said. “We can’t use our credit cards, and forty bucks isn’t enough for us to buy—”
“Will ten thousand dollars be enough?” She pulled her hand out of the bag and held up a thick wad of bills.
“Where did you get ten thousand dollars?”
“It’s part of my runaway kit. I keep it in a secret compartment in my shoulder bag.” She held open her bag to show him a side compartment that had been tightly sealed with Velcro so that it appeared to be an inside side seam. “Cash, alternate identification, credit cards”—she slapped a phone into his hand—“and a burner phone. Already activated. Everythin’ I need in case my cover gets blown or somethin’, and I need to hit the road in a hurry.”
While she explained her runaway kit, David counted out the cash. As she had said, she had ten thousand dollars in used mixed bills. “Ten thousand dollars. Where were you planning to run away to? The Antarctic?”
“Who says that when you’re makin’ a quick getaway you can’t do it in style?” She snatched the money back, bound it together with a rubber band, and placed it in her bag. “I also have a driver’s license and two credit cards—a MasterCard and a Platinum American Express under a new identity. Unfortunately, I only have one ID, and it’s for a woman, so I guess it’s mine. But that’s okay.”
Without missing a beat, she switched to a heavy New Jersey accent, which, combined with her low, sultry voice, made David suck in his breath. “I’ll be Angelina Rosetti from Joisey, and you can be my boy toy, Tony”—she wrapped her arms around his neck and batted her eyelashes—“caterin’ to my every de-si-re.”
While he and Ed were taking the elevator down at the Four Seasons, Mac squinted at the screen of his cell phone and thumbed the “end” button.
“What’s wrong?” Ed asked him.
“David’s phone keeps going straight to voice mail.”
Mac tightened his grip on Gnarly’s leash when the elevator doors opened to allow a couple to step on. Spotting the German shepherd, they paused before boarding the elevator.
“Maybe he let the battery die,” Ed suggested.