Third Degree

by Greg Iles

  “I won’t.”

  “If you don’t—if you say something’s wrong in here, or that I shot Kyle—you can bet your life they’ll come busting in here with guns blazing. And I can’t be responsible for what happens after that.”

  She wondered if this was true. So far, she’d seen only one car outside. But there had to be more. And the local cops she’d met seemed more likely to use guns than diplomacy to resolve a standoff. She nodded once, and Warren held the phone up to her face. “Deputy Breen?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Can your husband hear me?”

  At that moment, Warren pressed his ear to the receiver. “No.”

  “Are you all right today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in any danger?”

  “Danger?”

  “We heard there might have been some gunplay in the house.”

  “Just an accident. It’s all right now.”

  “And your daughter? Is she all right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Could I talk to her?”

  “Of course.”

  Warren knelt in front of Beth and said, “Say hello to the man, Beth. He’s a nice man.”

  “Hel-lo,” Beth said, reverting to her usual telephone ritual. “What’s your name?”

  “She’s busy, Ray,” Warren said, standing erect with the phone. He listened for a few seconds, then said, “Kyle’s busy right now, too. . . . Uh-huh. . . . I understand that. Look, our practice is being audited by the IRS right now, and we’re having a pretty tense day going over our books. Kyle is deep into them with the calculator right now, but as soon as he’s done, I’ll have him call you.”

  Laurel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. In all the time she had known Warren, she had hardly ever heard him lie. Now he was spinning out bullshit with the facility of Kyle Auster. As he continued to evade Breen’s questions, she thought about what the deputy had said. Grant had obviously reached a neighbor’s house, probably the Elfmans’. He would be terrified, but Bonnie Elfman would take good care of him.

  “Listen, Ray,” Warren said, his tone growing testy. “The thing is, I’m waiting for something in here. We’re running a computer program, and we’re waiting for a certain result. Once I have that, we’ll all come out and visit with you guys for the rest of the evening, if you want. But this is business, Ray. It’s important. You know what I mean? . . . Of course you do. All right. As soon as I have what I need in here, we’re all coming out. . . . Kyle, too, absolutely. . . . Good talking to you, too.”

  Warren hung up, jerked the curtains over the kitchen window, and turned to Laurel with manic energy. “Get some sheets out of the laundry room to cover Kyle. I’ll stay with Beth.”

  Laurel started to argue, but then she remembered that her clone phone was sitting on the shelf in the laundry room. Warren was letting her go alone because he knew she wouldn’t leave Beth inside the house with him. “I’ll be right back,” she said, touching Beth’s arm. She walked into the pantry, which led to the laundry room.

  “The door to the garage is bolted,” Warren called, in case she had a lapse of maternal judgment.

  She reached up and slid her Razr off the detergent shelf. Her heart leaped when she saw 3 NEW MESSAGES on its LCD screen. Flipping open the phone, she bent over the laundry basket and made rummaging noises among some folded sheets. The first message read, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll b close by if u need me. I love u. So much hope and relief suffused her heart that she felt giddy. The second message read, Saw both cars home. What should I do?

  “What’s the holdup?” Warren called.

  Laurel picked up two folded sheets as she read the third message: Text me the instant u r out of there! Crazy with worry!

  “Me, too,” she whispered, sliding the phone into her back pocket.

  She carried the sheets out to the kitchen and set them on the granite countertop. “What now?”

  “I’m going to move Kyle out of the hall,” Warren said softly. “You’re coming with me.”

  “I think I’m going to give Beth that Benadryl after all,” Laurel murmured. “If we’re lucky, it’ll cause short-term memory loss.”

  He frowned and picked up the sheets. “I need some food. We all do.”

  “I’ll cook something,” Laurel offered. “Breakfast would be easiest.”

  He nodded.

  She looked at Beth lying on the banquette. “Would you like an egg with a hat on it?”

  Beth actually sat up at this suggestion. “And grits and biscuits? And grape jelly!”

  “Tell you what,” Warren said to Laurel, “you do the work with the sheets. Leave Beth with me. I’m going to shut all the blinds, then start the food.”

  Laurel hesitated, then nodded in agreement. She took the sheets and went down the hall with Danny’s messages running through her mind. She hadn’t thought to check the time stamps, but he obviously hadn’t followed her advice to leave town. Running simply wasn’t in him. So where was he now? He must have driven by the house at least once, she thought. Or else that was his plane I heard before. He knows I’m here with Warren. And that, combined with me not showing up in the clearing, started him worrying. But what can he do? Danny sometimes flew the Sheriff’s Department helicopter and so was fairly tight with the sheriff. If he’d heard the report of a shooting out here, Laurel was sure he would find a way to get himself into the loop. Once that happened, it would only be a matter of time before someone came to save her and Beth. Danny would have a tricky job trying to explain his concerns without betraying their affair, but she felt sure he could do it.

  She looked down at Kyle’s body. His eyes were still open, but the opaque irises held no life. The dead face already looked more like a wax figure of Kyle than the man himself. Pity rose in her, but she knew that her duty was to the living, not the dead. She thought of texting Danny that Kyle had been shot, but Warren might be watching from the end of the hall.

  Unfolding one of the sheets, she laid it gently over Kyle’s corpse, then with considerable effort rolled the body over. Then she stood and dragged it to the guest room door. With the sheet under him, Kyle slid fairly easily on the polished hardwood. Getting him over the threshold was harder, but she turned away from him, grabbed his ankles under her arms as though hitching a cart to a mule, and in three great heaves dragged him onto the carpet and clear of the door.

  With the walls of the guest room around her, an almost irresistible compulsion to call Danny took hold of her. As she reached out to close the door, Warren appeared there with Beth in his arms.

  “Good enough,” he said, keeping Beth’s head turned away. “We miss you.”

  She swallowed hard, then followed Warren back to the kitchen. Danny knows I need help, she told herself. He knows everything he needs to know. I’ve got to keep the phone secret, no matter what. It might make the difference between life and death.

  “You take over,” Warren said, pointing at the iron skillet heating on the stove. An egg carton and a can of Pillsbury biscuits lay beside it. “I’m going to check the computer.”

  The computer. As it had been from the beginning, her laptop remained the greatest danger to her. At any moment, the Merlin’s Magic program could give Warren access to hundreds of messages from Danny: love letters, embedded digital photos, all the stuff she’d been insane ever to put on her hard drive. All the things someone in love can’t live without. “No worries,” she said brightly. “Beth and I have got it under control.”

  Warren seemed about to take Beth with him to the great room, but then he walked away alone. “All the doors are bolted,” he reminded her. “And I took out the keys.”

  “Thanks for that information,” Laurel replied in a tone that said, Stop upsetting our daughter.

  “Don’t open the blinds,” he added. “And tap the skillet with a fork while I’m down there.”

  “Just go already!”

  He vanished into the great room.

  She clanked the skillet a couple of times,
then lifted Beth onto the counter beside the Viking cooktop. Laurel felt almost drunk with adrenaline. A new plan had come to her, and she had no time for second thoughts. There was risk, yes, but she was almost certain that she and Beth would survive it. She cracked four eggs open and dumped them into the skillet with her right hand while holding Beth’s hand with her left. “Daddy’s not right in the head now, punkin,” she whispered. “Can you tell that?”

  Beth nodded with wide eyes and whispered, “Daddy lied to that policeman on the phone.”

  “Yes, he did. I need you to do one thing for me, darling. One easy thing, and then we can go outside where Grant and the nice policemen are. Will you do that for me?”

  Beth nodded again.

  “Do you remember where my laptop is? Down on the coffee table?”

  “Uh-huh. Where Daddy is.”

  “After Daddy comes back up here, I want you to take your glass of water down to the great room like you’re going to play. Then I want you to unplug the computer and dump your water into my keyboard.”

  Beth opened her mouth in shock. “What?”

  “Pour it right into the keys, where the letters are. But be sure you unplug it first. And don’t touch the computer with your hands afterward. That’s important. Just dump the water into the keyboard from high above it. Far away. No touching.”

  Beth blinked several times, processing Laurel’s request. “I can do that. But won’t Daddy be mad?”

  “He’s going to be mad at me, not you. But that’s what we have to do to make all this stop. Okay?”

  Beth smiled. “Okay.”

  “Unplug the computer first. And don’t touch it with your hands.”

  “I know. Electricity, right?”

  Laurel smiled with satisfaction, then retrieved Beth’s glass from the table by the banquette. She knew from experience that it would take a couple of seconds for the water to penetrate the Sony’s keyboard, and unplugging the computer from the wall socket would step it down to battery power rather than the 110 volts coming from the mains. The danger of lethal voltage arcing back to Beth was almost nonexistent, but the probability of frying the computer itself was high. As Warren came back to the kitchen, Laurel said, “Any luck with your computer program?”

  “It’s coming along,” he said without looking at her. “A seven-space password has seventy-eight billion possible combinations. Even more, really, depending on how many characters you choose from.”

  “How interesting.”

  He looked at her oddly. Stay cool, she told herself. Don’t get cocky. He’s going to go ballistic in about two minutes—

  “Where are you going?” he asked Beth, who had been spinning in circles like a ballerina on Warren’s side of the island, but now was walking toward the hall.

  “Nowhere!” she said breathlessly. “I’m tired of sitting around.”

  “Well, we have to sit around awhile longer.”

  Laurel saw that Beth didn’t have the water glass in her hand, but it was nowhere in sight either. She had stashed it somewhere, like a good little conspirator. Probably on the floor.

  Laurel needed Warren to move to her side of the island. She rotated the burner control beneath the eggs to HIGH, then turned toward the sink and began loudly washing the bowl she’d used to hold the broken eggshells.

  “Hey,” Warren said. “Hey! You’re burning them!”

  “What?”

  “You’re burning the eggs!”

  She spun from the sink and let her anger show. “Is your butt nailed to that stool?”

  He got up and stalked around the island. Laurel went back to rinsing the bowl. She was turning off the water when a cracking sound came from the great room, followed by a screech.

  “What the—?” Warren looked around anxiously. “Elizabeth?”

  He scanned every corner of the kitchen and den, then ran for the great room. Laurel scrambled around the island and went after him.

  “Where are you?” Warren shouted. “What are you doing?”

  Laurel heard a primal scream of fury just before she reached the great room. The acrid stink of burned plastic filled her nostrils. Beth was cowering by the arm of the sofa, the empty water glass still in her hand, her eyes on her enraged father.

  Warren stood over the silent Vaio, staring down with mute incomprehension on his face. When he looked down at Beth, she bolted toward Laurel, tossing the glass aside as she ran. She leaped into her mother’s arms, and Laurel backed slowly toward the arch behind her.

  “Elizabeth?” Warren snapped. “Did your mother tell you to do that?”

  “No!” Beth shouted, stunning Laurel. “I hate that computer! It’s making you crazy!”

  Warren glared at his daughter like a sea captain staring down a mutinous member of his crew.

  “Of course I told her to do it,” Laurel said with a calm she did not feel. “It had to be done. I’m sure you can hire a lawyer to get those e-mails from the company, and that’s probably what you should do. But this nightmare has to end. It has ended. I’m not playing this game anymore.”

  He opened his mouth but did not reply. Then he squeezed his hands into fists, which he pressed hard against his temples. Laurel was starting to believe that she had actually won when he closed the space between them in four quick bounds and backhanded her to the floor.

  Beth screamed as they fell.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Deputy Carl Sims turned right off of Highway 24 and drove through the wrought-iron gate into Avalon, a subdivision he had only seen through the windows of his patrol cruiser. Carl had grown up in Sandy Bottom, an all-black neighborhood in the river lowlands of Lusahatcha County, well outside the city limits. The only whites who spent any time in Sandy Bottom were the well-checkers who operated the oil wells owned by the white businessmen in Athens Point. When Carl was a boy, pumping units had operated right in people’s yards, but few of the residents ever saw a dime of the money that oil generated. Even if they managed to save enough to buy the land their houses stood on, they weren’t going to get mineral rights with it. Not in Sandy Bottom.

  Carl drove past several six-thousand-square-foot houses set deep in the trees, then turned onto Lyonesse Drive and stopped at a makeshift roadblock. Deputy Willie Jones had parked his cruiser so that it blocked most of Lyonesse, and a sawhorse with orange tape on it blocked the rest. Willie was twenty-six, four years older than Carl, but he always treated Carl as if they were the same age. He walked up to Carl’s Jeep Cherokee and grinned broadly.

  “What’s up, my brother? You off duty, huh?”

  “Was. Not anymore.”

  “This be some shit, don’t it?” Willie said with nervous excitement. “Dr. Shields all barricaded in his house and shit? Don’t make no sense to me.”

  Carl nodded soberly. Warren Shields had been treating both his mother and father for the past six years, and they spoke of him almost reverently. Or they had until Carl’s mother had her stroke, which was what had brought Carl back to Athens Point rather than to Atlanta, where his girlfriend lived. Now only Carl’s father could praise Dr. Shields in intelligible words. Dr. Shields had spent several hours with Carl and his father over the past year, advising them on how best to care for Eugenia Sims, and Carl had instinctively liked the man. Shields treated his father with the respect due an older man, and he treated Carl just as he would anybody else, no better or worse. Carl liked that. Shields reminded him of doctors he’d known in the service, truly color-blind and focused on their work.

  “You don’t think they’ll tell you to shoot Dr. Shields, do you?” Willie asked, his smile suddenly gone. “I mean, not without trying to talk him out first?”

  Carl shook his head. “Let’s hope not.”

  Willie gave an exaggerated nod.

  “Is the sheriff here?” Carl asked.

  Willie shook his head. “He fishing over in Louisiana. They sent Major Danny up to get him in the helicopter.”

  Bad luck, Carl thought. “Who’s in cha
rge now?”

  Willie curled his lips and shook his head. “You know who. They done called out the TRU, ain’t they? Old Cowboy Ray hisself. Him and his little brother are up there unloading all their SWAT shit. Looks like the FBI at Waco or something.”

  The Tactical Response Unit was Athens Point’s version of a SWAT team. It comprised fifteen officers recruited from both the municipal police and the Sheriff’s Department. About half had military experience, most in the National Guard. Carl was one of the few who had served in Iraq; he was the team’s designated sniper.

  “Hey, Willie!” crackled Jones’s radio. “Any sign of Carl yet?”

  Willie rolled his eyes at the heavy redneck accent coming from his radio. “Deputy Sims just pulled up, sir.”

  “Well, send him back here. We’re setting up the position, and I want to get his input on interlocking angles of fire.”

  “Jesus,” said Carl.

  “Uh-huh,” Willie agreed.

  “Has anybody even talked to Dr. Shields yet?”

  Willie shrugged. Then his radio crackled again.

  “We’ve set up the command post in the Shieldses’ front yard, under a stand of trees. Tell Carl to get his ass up here, ricky-tick.”

  “You heard the man,” said Willie.

  Carl exhaled long and slow, trying to prepare himself for the blast of testosterone he would encounter a few hundred yards up the street.

  “I hope the sheriff gets here soon,” Willie said.

  “You and me both, brother.”

  Carl took his foot off the brake and idled up Lyonesse. Nearly two months since the TRU was last called out. In that case, they’d received a report of a man barricaded in his downtown house with his family. What the TRU found when it arrived on the scene was quite different: a local engineer lying in his bathtub with a homemade bomb in his lap and his family safe outside. The TRU didn’t have a trained hostage negotiator, so anybody might wind up talking to the subject, depending on circumstances. In the engineer’s case, the sheriff had spent two hours talking to him through the bathroom window, shielded by the wall, a flak jacket, and a bulletproof helmet. Sheriff Ellis had less than two years on the job, and his last law-enforcement experience had been as an MP in Germany twenty years before. He was a God-fearing man who had a good rapport with people, but it hadn’t been enough. The engineer blew himself up while the sheriff prayed for his immortal soul, repainting the bathroom with what had been his insides a millisecond before. Sheriff Ellis was wounded by ricocheting shrapnel that turned out to be a chunk of jawbone.