by Coyle, Matt;
“Okay. Even.” I held up my hands. “But how did you stop the man from killing both of us? Why did he leave? I know you can fight, but he almost killed you. Why didn’t he finish the job?”
“He almost did. He had me down and was on top of me and kept punching my head. I got a hand up and tried to gouge his eyes, but could only rip off his ski mask.” Her eyes glistened with moisture. “The garage started to go dark on me. I knew I was going to die. Then he shifted his body, and with strength that must have come from God, I jammed my knee into his testicles. I hurt him and he rolled off me. Then we heard a siren, and he ran out of the garage and drove off. The siren faded out like it was up on the freeway. Somebody didn’t want us to die last night, Rick.”
“I guess so.” I held her hand and squeezed it. Lucky to be alive, but my situation hadn’t changed. “Rankin told me you told the police you couldn’t remember anything about how you got hurt. Do you think they believed you?”
“I’m not sure, but they won’t do anything unless I suddenly remember something and call them.”
“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?”
“Where I grew up, you didn’t talk to the police. Alan wouldn’t have approved, either.”
“Okay.” Nothing had been easy in this woman’s life, but she wouldn’t play victim. “Did you get a look at the guy’s face? I know you pulled his ski mask off at some point.”
“Yes.”
I took the photo from Jim Colton’s wall out of the backpack I’d brought with me and put it in Miranda’s lap.
“Is he in this picture?” Jim Colton and Doug McCafferty were dead. Odell Rollins was black. That left Kyle Bates. I was 99 percent sure the man in the ski mask hadn’t been Bates. All the SEALS I’d seen from Colton’s unit were built about the same. V frames, muscular without being musclebound. Rollins was the thicker outlier. Bates looked to be slightly leaner than Ski Mask and his voice didn’t match. But he could have altered his voice, and my perception of the man in the mask was skewed because I only saw him while I was sitting or nearly upside down and under duress and briefly in the hospital before the chase.
Miranda intently studied the photograph. Finally, she handed it back to me. “No. He’s not in there.”
She kept staring at the photo as I held it in my lap.
“What is it?” I asked.
She held out her hand, and I gave her back the picture frame. She studied it again for a few seconds, then put her finger on one of the men in the photo and tilted it toward me. “This isn’t the guy, but there’s a resemblance. Could be this guy’s brother, maybe. Something about his eyes.”
Miranda’s finger was on Doug McCafferty. I didn’t know if McCafferty had a brother, I just knew he was dead. I studied his eyes and tried to picture them surrounded by a black ski mask. They were blue and hard. The man’s eyes at the body shop had been blue and hard also, but colder. Remorseless.
Although there were some similarities in the eyes between Doug McCafferty and the man in the mask, I wasn’t convinced there was a familial resemblance. I put the photo back in my backpack again, then noticed the dry erase board hanging on the wall. Hospitals use them to put up patient information like emergency phone numbers and to keep track of nurses’ schedules.
I went over to the board and grabbed the black marker on the board’s mantel. I sat back down and retrieved the photo from the backpack.
“Are you going to draw on a beard?” Miranda craned from her bed to see what I was doing. “He didn’t have one.”
“No. A ski mask.” I colored McCafferty’s face black except the eyes. A chill froze along my spine. I showed the altered photo to Miranda.
“Yep. Those are the same eyes, but the rest of his face is different. Weird. Who is he?”
“A dead soldier.”
CHAPTER FORTY
BRIANNE AND GEORGE both greeted me at the hotel room door. A honey-I’m-home moment in our new makeshift relationship. We walked over to the bed and sat down, and I told Brianne about my visit with Miranda and the eyes of Doug McCafferty.
“Do you know if he had a brother?” I asked her.
“I only met him a few times. Back when they all completed SEAL training and a couple family barbeques when they returned home from deployment. Doug had a different girl on his arm each time I saw him. I don’t remember him or Jim mentioning a brother.”
Brianne’s computer tablet sat on the desk across from the bed.
“Do you mind if I use your tablet?” I stood up.
“Hold on!” She leapt up and punched a couple keys on the Bluetooth keyboard. She turned back to me, a little red in the face. “Sorry.”
“Diary?” I sat down at the desk.
“In a way. I’m writing a new song and I don’t want you to see it until I’m ready to play it for you.”
“Wow. Can’t wait. I’m honored.” Nobody had ever sung a song to me. My wife used to read me her poems. Back in the early days before everything turned to shit and she died.
“Wait until you hear it before you go and feel honored.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Well, I am a country singer, after all. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns.”
“Nope. Pickup trucks, cheating hearts, and whiskey.”
“And cowboy boots.”
“Oh, yeah.” I tapped on the Bluetooth keyboard and brought up a free data-mining website. “Do you know where McCafferty lived before he died?”
“Oceanside. I think.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“Oh.” She put her hands on her hips and looked down at the carpet. “Probably about thirty-five or -six.”
I punched in what I knew about McCafferty into the website. I searched through page after page, but didn’t find anyone who matched our guy. Free sites can only take you so far. I pulled a credit card out of my wallet and looked up a pay site I often used.
“Use mine.” Brianne grabbed her purse and searched for her wallet.
“That’s okay. This one’s on the house. Perks for writing a song that I may or may not be honored to hear.”
I punched in the credit card info and then McCafferty’s information. A list of Doug McCaffertys popped up. Bingo. Douglas Scott McCafferty, 1970–2006. There were a number of residences, the last one being in Vista, California, which was just east of Oceanside. His military history was listed, including that he’d been a SEAL. His parents were both deceased, but he did have a brother, Dwight Edward McCafferty, age thirty-seven. Current residence, Boise, Idaho.
Brianne read the information over my shoulder. “You think he could have been the guy who tried to kill you?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
I paid for a search on the brother. He was married with two young children. He’d followed his older brother into the Navy but only served four years. He’d been a sales rep for a sporting goods company for the last three years, but before that had been in pharmaceutical sales. Double bingo. I wondered how many samples he’d kept and if one of them was fentanyl. I told Brianne about my talk with the coroner and her guess that it could have been fentanyl that had been used on me and her husband to knock us unconscious.
“Oh, my Lord, and he used to be a pharmaceutical rep.” She lifted her head and pinched her lips. “I’m not sure if pharmaceutical reps have access to an opioid like fentanyl.”
“What?” I blinked. “How the hell would you know something like that?”
“Our bass player’s sister is a rep.”
“Whether McCafferty sold it or not, he might know how to get hold of some or another drug like it.”
“You’re probably right.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “How do we find out if he was here last night and when Jim was killed?”
“For the night Jim died, we’d need to get some law enforcement agency involved or I’ll have to impersonate a cop. I have a ruse to find out about last night, but it will only work if I talk to his wife and not him.”
I
used the hotel phone to dial the number the data-mining website had for Dwight McCafferty. Brianne would have to eat the cost for this one. The websites rarely had cell phone numbers and usually provided landlines. I hoped that was the case tonight.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice. So far, so good.
“Mrs. McCafferty?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry to bother you. My name’s Dave Belton and I’m an old SEAL buddy of Dwight’s brother, Doug, God bless his soul. I’m in Boise for a couple days and was supposed to meet Dwight last night to toast the memory of his brother. Unfortunately, he didn’t show, and I lost his cell phone number. Is he home tonight? Maybe I got the nights mixed up.” I held my breath and hoped McCafferty wasn’t there.
“Oh. Maybe Dwight was the one who mixed up the nights. He’s out of town on business, but he’ll be back tomorrow. Why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll make sure he calls you back. I’m sorry.”
“Okay, here’s my cell.” I gave her a made-up number with a San Diego area code. “I must have gotten the dates all messed up. He was out of town last night, too?”
“Yes. He has to travel a lot for his job. He has a big sales territory.”
I thanked her and hung up, then relayed Mrs. McCafferty’s side of the conversation to Brianne.
“Oh, my God.” She slumped down onto the bed. “This guy really could be Jim’s killer. What do we do now?”
I Googled Dwight McCafferty, Boise sporting goods sales rep, and listings came up for him in a Boise State charity function. I clicked on the hyperlink and a picture of McCafferty with the Boise State baseball coach came up. It was small and in low res. I spread my fingers on the tablet’s screen and enlarged the photo. A little blurry, but his eyes were blue, just like the man’s in the ski mask.
I couldn’t tell if they were the eyes of a killer.
I looked him up on social media and didn’t find any Dwight McCaffertys who were a match for Doug’s brother. But when I punched in his wife’s name, I found him. She had a lot of photos on her page, mostly of their children. There were a few with Dwight in them, but he was always smiling with the kids. Hard to match the joy in his eyes with the cold stare of the killer’s I’d seen last night. But I couldn’t rule him out. Not by a long shot.
* * *
Brianne and I made love again an hour later. Her passion pulled me in and I got lost in it for a while. I didn’t want to find my way back to my real life. Once we finished, I couldn’t avoid it. Dwight McCafferty, Oak Rollins, Alan Rankin, and Tony Moretti all whirlpooled around in my head. But on the perimeter of the swirling eddy was a life preserver. Brianne. She was a part of my life now. The good in the bad.
Was she the broken rule that could save me?
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I WOKE UP and looked at the clock: 8:27 a.m. Holy crap. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept past seven thirty. My head reminded me that it still had a lump on it. Despite sleeping in, I hadn’t had a restful sleep. I rolled over to an empty space next to me.
“Good morning.” Brianne sat at the desk in a t-shirt and a thong, her head turned toward me. Hotel life on the run wasn’t so bad.
“Looks that way.” I smiled, but the itch that had turned my sleep restless still nibbled at me. “We need to talk.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” She stood up and took a step toward the bed.
“No.” I held up my hand. “Stay there. Please. I don’t want having you next to me influence me or vice versa.”
She sat back down in the chair and pursed her lips. “Now you have me really worried, Rick. What’s going on?”
I sat up in bed. “I think it’s time for you to go to the police.”
“Why now?”
“I don’t think Police Chief Moretti or LJPD had anything to do with Jim’s death. It looks like this Dwight McCafferty dude and someone else killed Jim. I don’t see a connection with Moretti.”
“Okay, Rick. I have confidence in your judgment. But you said it was time for me to go to the police. Don’t you mean we?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure how to say what I needed to without scaring Brianne away. But maybe that was the only fair thing to do. “A couple days ago Agent Richmond told you some things about me you didn’t know. There’s more. When Police Chief Moretti gets together enough evidence, he’s going to arrest me for murder.”
“What?” Brianne’s eyes circled in fear. “Who does he think you killed?”
“Randall Eddington.”
“The man you helped free from prison who went missing?” Her eyebrows rose.
“Yes.”
“Why does he think you killed him?”
“He has his reasons.”
She studied my face. I held her eyes letting her search inside me. Finally she spoke, “When we went to the FBI, I’d only known you for a few days, but I felt like I knew you well. Knew the person you were. When Agent Richmond told me those things about you, I wasn’t only upset with you, I was upset with myself. I was mad because I’d fallen for this person I hardly knew and who I’d already created a whole persona around.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But darlin’, I was right in the first place. The last two days have shown me that. Yes, we’ve only known each other a week, but that week has had more adversity than most people will ever have to endure in a lifetime. I don’t care about some FBI file that has ten-year-old information. I know who you are now.”
“Randall Eddington wasn’t ten years ago.” I had to give her an out. She was the rule I’d broken. I didn’t want to be the mistake she’d made.
“I don’t have to know what happened to Randall Eddington. I know who you are. That’s all I have to know. If you think we should go to the police, let’s go right now. If you only think that I should go, I’ll wait until you’re ready for we.”
“Look, Brianne, going to the police might be the only way you can stay alive.” I looked down at the bed, then back at Brianne. “I’ve been putting my freedom ahead of this case. I’ve made decisions because I didn’t want to get arrested, not because I thought they’d help the case. I might be some of the man you think I am, but I also know the other half.”
“I know that other half, too. It’s a survivor.” She walked over to the bed, knelt down, and took my hand in hers. “And I’m going to hold onto that half as hard as I hold onto the rest of you because I know all of you will help keep me safe. You’ve already risked your life for me. It would have been easy for you to walk away from this case, but you didn’t. We are where we are because you tried to help me. There’s no way I’m going to walk away from you now.”
She kissed me. I pulled her onto the bed and delayed the start of the day another hour.
We finished in each other’s arms. We stayed there, silent, staring into each other’s eyes for what seemed like minutes. Brianne’s blue eyes, both piercing and inviting at once. My broken rule. What would be the repercussion?
“Kyle Bates told me a story about a beach party the other day.” I studied her eyes. They closed and she let out a breath through her nose. Her eyes opened at half-mast.
“What did he say?”
“That you came on to him.”
“Well, he’s right.” She frowned.
“I’m listening.” I waited for the broken rule’s whiplash.
“Kyle always flirted with me whenever we were alone. I always thought it was an act and macho bullshit.” She sat up and held her pillow in front of her. “We were at this beach party and I got tired of listening to the boys tell war stories by the bonfire so I took a walk down the beach. Kyle slipped off and caught up to me and started in with the flirting, so I called his bluff thinking he’d back off and stop flirting all the time. That was a mistake. He thought I was serious and tried to kiss me.”
“What happened?”
“I had to use all my strength to push him off. He finally let go and walked back to the bonfire.”
“Did you ever tell Jim?�
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“No. Jim and I weren’t getting along anyway and I felt kind of guilty for leading him on.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have. Kyle is a jerk who doesn’t understand boundaries. He thinks he can take whatever he wants.”
“Do you think he could have had something to do with Jim’s death?”
“No. Not really. He’s a jerk, but I don’t think he’s a killer. He kind of held Jim in awe.”
My phone groaned on the nightstand. Unknown number. Another one. Nothing good had come from unknown phone numbers. I answered anyway.
“Rick? This is Special Agent Mallon.” Hushed voice.
I sat up in bed. “Yes, Agent Mallon.”
Brianne’s eyes and mouth formed O’s.
“Can we meet?” Clipped.
“Sure. When and where?”
“There’s a restaurant called Leilani’s Café on Cass Street in Pacific Beach. Can you meet me there at noon?”
“I know the restaurant. I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LEILANI’S LOOKED LIKE it belonged on the beach even though it sat a few blocks inland. Weather-worn wood shingle structure that had seating for about twelve inside and three times that on its two wooden decks outside. It also had the best Hawaiian food in San Diego. And maybe the forty-eight contiguous states.
I beat Mallon to the restaurant and ordered at the window inside. The tan-even-in-November Polynesian woman behind the counter handed me a little table stand with a number on it.
The noon sky had turned leaden, brewing up some El Nino rain. Unfortunately, inside was taken so I sat at a table in the corner of the deck and waited for Special Agent Mallon, my food, and the rain.
My food arrived at 12:10. No Mallon. No rain. Darker skies.
At 12:15, I wondered if Special Agent Mallon had stood me up. Or if the FBI and LJPD had formed a joint task force and were about to roll up with sirens blazing and arrest me. Or if Mallon was dead and Ski Mask was behind a parked car on the street with a rifle lining up a bull’s-eye on my head.