by Harvey, JM
“Took care of?” Victoria said then barked a harsh peal of almost hysterical laughter. “Your REACT team murdered Randall Rusk, Nolan.”
Nolan frowned. “Murdered?” he said. “Those men saved your life, Victoria.”
She shook her head. “Rusk wasn’t after me. If he had been, I’d be on a gurney beside Big Sandy and Albert. He was after Rankin.”
The hat stopped turning. Swisher cocked his head. “Well, that’s not the way I heard it,” he said. “Not at all. The way it was told to me, Rankin was just unlucky to be between you and Rusk. Rusk killed him and was about to kill you when the REACT team arrived.” Sheriff Swisher’s incredulous tone made Victoria bristle.
“Heard from who?” she demanded, “I doubt that your deputies are going to admit to first degree homicide and everyone else who saw it is dead except for me.”
“Herby Lubbock is still alive, not that the fact pleases me,” the sheriff said. “I’d trade a world full of Herby Lubbock’s for one Big Sandy. But Lubbock was there and he says Rankin just got in the way. That Randall screamed at you then charged you. He says Rusk was about to gut you when the React Team came through the door.”
“Herby was pissing his pants at the end of the hall,” Victoria said, growing more furious by the second. “He knocked Deputy Foster unconscious in his hurry to get the hell out of there. Rusk was out to get Rankin, and he did that. And then your React Team murdered Rusk.”
“Murdered,” Nolan said, making a pained face. “You keep throwing that word around.” The hat started turning again as he shook his head. “I’d say it was more like taking out the garbage.”
Nolan—”
“Lubbock gave a sworn statement,” he said. “Signed and all.”
“You can stick that statement up his ass,” Victoria snapped. Swisher’s hat abruptly stopped turning again and his eyes narrowed. Victoria lowered her voice and continued, “You’ve got the video from the hall cameras, Nolan. Why do you even need a statement from Herby? Pull up the tape and watch it for yourself, you’ll see that what I’m saying is true.”
Swisher’s expression turned even more dour. “All the cameras down here were on the fritz. One more damn electrical malfunction. Magnetic something the technician said. We got nothing but fuzz and static. Computers all crashed. That was the reason the security door wouldn’t open when the REACT Team arrived.”
“All the cameras?”
Swisher nodded. He put his Stetson on his head and fidgeted it around until it felt right. It looked too big for his shrunken skull. “Interview rooms, hallways, doors. Everything. So all I got is two eye witnesses with two different ideas of what happened.”
Victoria looked at the floor in stunned silence. Everything that had happened back there was gone. And there went her case against the REACT team. But it was a more personal issue that knocked the wind out of her - everything that Axel Rankin had said in the interview room was gone as well. Everything. Her head reeled. She needed to sit down and write out all she could remember from the interview. Not that it would be admissible in court. Dead men can’t testify.
“Go on home and get some rest,” Swisher said as he turned and opened the hall door. He stopped there and looked back at her, his eyes half hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. I intend to have a word with Mr. Lubbock.”
“So, there was no key and the cameras were on the fritz,” Victoria said, unwilling to let it go. “Makes it pretty easy to make up any kind of story you want about what happened, doesn’t it, Nolan?”
Nolan started to speak, but she pressed on before he could.
“But you’re probably happy that Rankin’s dead. And Abby Sutton, too. Without them, I doubt the feds will have much luck investigating the murder of Willy Henderson.” Nolan started to reply, but she wasn’t done. “Are you sure your men aren’t committing one murder after another, each one to cover up the last?” She knew she sounded like a conspiracy nut, but she was too angry to care. Something crooked was going on inside the Sheriff’s office, she felt sure of it. And people were dying because of it.
When Nolan replied, his voice was as tight as barbed wire. “You been through a lot today, Victoria. You’re not in your right mind, so I’m going to try not to take offense.” He turned his back on her and pushed through the doorway. “But if you’re looking for murderers, you might want to start a little closer to home,” he said as the door sighed closed behind him.
28
Val turned the cooking duties over to Griggs then led Jack Birch out to the garage. It took Val twenty minutes of rummaging through the gun safe to find the receipt signed by Gus Perdido. He really needed to establish some order out here, he thought, as he looked around the messy old safe and then let his eyes drift on to the rest of the over-stuffed garage. Snow skis and camping gear were piled precariously along one wall, lawn equipment along another. The middle of the garage was cluttered with boxes of junk that rightfully should be tagged for the next community yard sale. Just thinking about cleaning it up made him weary. He handed the receipt to Jack and led the way back to the kitchen.
The boys were happily munching away and Gary had a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches piled on a plate. The tomato soup was just starting to get warm so Val got two plastic bowls down from the cabinet and filled them. The bowls had a lip on the bottom that locked into the highchairs’ trays making soup dispensing slightly less messy. The soup still went everywhere, but at least the twins couldn’t throw the bowls at the walls.
“Four of those are mine,” Gary warned as Joe ferried the sandwich plate to the table.
“Four?” Val asked cocking an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Normally I’d have two,” Gary replied defensively, “but all you have is fifty-percent less fat cheese and low-fat bread. I figured I should double up.”
Val shook his head and let it go. There went a loaf of bread, a package of American cheese and three cans of tomato soup. He’d be back at the grocery store tomorrow.
Val considered asking Jack to invite Gruene in for lunch. He was feeling a little sorry for the detective. It was obvious that she hadn’t approved of Erath’s interrogation technique, but she hadn’t tried to stop it either. And she had given him a shot to the balls yesterday…screw her, she didn’t deserve a grilled cheese sandwich, even if it was fifty-percent less fat cheese.
Jack looked over the gun receipt as Griggs, Joe and Val started eating. When Jack was done, he tucked it into his jacket pocket.
“Mind telling me why Deputy Erath was using you for a punching bag?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” Val said around a mouthful of grilled cheese.
“The City pays me by the hour,” Jack replied as he pulled an old-fashioned spiral pad from his jacket pocket and opened it. “Let’s have it.”
Val let him have it, leaving out nothing, even his assault on Zeke with the tow truck and a length of rebar. By the time he had finished, Jack had filled five pages of the small notebook with his indecipherable scrawl. He closed the pad and tucked it away.
“Fifteen million dollars,” Griggs said as he polished off his fourth sandwich. He reached for the last sandwich on the plate but Val beat him to it.
Gary frowned as Val bit into it and started to chew. “You’d think a man with fifteen million dollars wouldn’t begrudge an old friend a fifth grilled cheese sandwich.”
“A man with fifteen million dollars wouldn’t be eating grilled cheese,” Val pointed out around a mouthful of sandwich.
“You guys never did find the money, did you, Jack?” Joe Rodriguez asked. He stood and carried his soup bowl and plate to the sink.
Jack shook his head. “We didn’t look that hard. Insurance investigators spent a lot of time on it and came up dry.”
“That money’s long gone.” Gary heaved his bulk out of the chair and cleared his dishes. “If it wasn’t, I’d be grabbing a shovel and a metal detector myself.”
“Tell that to Garland S
utton,” Val said but he was only half listening to the conversation. He was working through the facts he had, considering the angles and possibilities.
“Whoever crippled Abby four years ago killed her,” he mused aloud. It was the only way to explain the gun resurfacing after all this time. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Odds like that would make the pick-six Lotto look like a sure thing.
“Lots of people are going to think it was you,” Jack said. “That’s what made getting your gun so important.”
“At least the receipt from Gus gets you off the hook,” Gary said, propping one hip against the counter as Joe rinsed the dishes.
Birch shook his head. “Receipts can be faked,” he said. “We’d need Gus to back it up.”
“What time’s the séance?” Griggs asked and laughed, but no one else joined in.
The receipt was the least of Val’s concerns. He had the sinking feeling that he was being intentionally framed for this murder. That even Gus Perdido’s death was a part of the conspiracy. But who was doing the framing? Jasper Smith and Garland Sutton? Val would like to believe that, but it just didn’t make sense. Sending Val to prison wouldn’t get them the money. And what about the gun? How could Garland and Jasper have gotten the gun that crippled Abby? Unless they already had it? That made a sick kind of sense.
“Jasper Smith and Garland Sutton,” Val said aloud, speaking to himself more than to his companions. “It starts with them.” That was easy to say, but what was he going to do about it? Unfortunately, he only knew of one way to deal with men like Smith and Garland: arrest or kill them. No debate. No hesitation. But he wasn’t a cop anymore; he had no authority to arrest, and if he killed them it wouldn’t end with a police review board’s sanction this time around; it would end with him in prison.
Jack stood and looked down at his ex-partner. Jack had eaten only a few bites of his sandwich and he hadn’t touched the soup. He picked up his plate and bowl.
“Watch what you’re thinking there, Valentine,” Jack warned. “I see blood in your eye and you’re already facing one murder charge. You let me worry about Garland Sutton and Jasper Smith.”
Val flushed, embarrassed, but unsurprised that Jack had read him so easily. They had been partners for seven years.
“So, am I under arrest?” he asked.
Birch shook his head. “Let’s just say you’re on a short leash for the moment. Let me get with the Medical Examiner. If we can pin down the exact time of Abby’s death maybe you can alibi your way out of it.” Jack gave Val a splintery a smile. “But you might want to keep your toothbrush in your pocket and a bondsman on speed-dial.”
“And a pistol in your waistband in case daddy Sutton comes calling,” Griggs added with deadly seriousness.
29
Victoria watched in stunned silence as the door swung closed behind Sheriff Swisher.
Swisher’s parting shot about Valentine hit her hard. Was that meant as a threat to her, a warning that she should drop her accusations of murder against the Sheriff’s REACT Team? Or was it just part of a smoke screen that the Sheriff was creating to cover the fact that the STU was killing every member of the Confederate Syndicate that they could lay their hands on? Were all these murders just an attempt to erase the witnesses to the death of Willy Henderson, the Confederate Syndicate’s road boss? Whatever the reason, it scared the hell out of her, but she wasn’t going to walk away from this.
Victoria felt sure it was no coincidence that the video cameras had gone out of service. Without that video feed and the tape recordings, no one would ever know about the handcuff key or the coldblooded murder of Randall Rusk. But, what was she going to do about it? Offer up her half-baked conspiracy theories to the newspapers? Never. File a complaint with the US Attorney? It would be her word against Sheriff Swisher’s, an icon in the law enforcement community. And even if she did file a complaint and prevail, what then? Reprimands and terminations inside the jail complex for sure. Embarrassment and lawsuits. And, in the end, Victoria would be a pariah. And Big Sandy and Albert would still be dead. But none of that mattered; she wasn’t going to let this go. Too many crimes had been committed that day, by both inmates and deputies.
Her phone buzzed from deep in her purse. She fished it out and checked the caller ID. Charlie Baker, her assistant. She let the call go to voicemail then checked her missed calls. Three from Jack Birch and two voicemails. Victoria pulled up the first voicemail and listened.
Jack was his usual cryptic self - the man didn’t trust cell phones, but she got the gist of it: a warrant for Valentine’s arrest had been issued by Judge Pinto for the murder of Abby Sutton. No further explanation. Just the facts ma’am.
Damn that man!
Victoria hit the CALL BACK icon so hard that the raw flesh where her fingernail had been broken off started to bleed. She jammed the phone to her ear and listened to it ring three times before the call was shuttled to voicemail.
“Damn it!” she yelled at the phone, mindless of the startled look the jailer inside his bulletproof glass cube gave her. She threw the phone into her purse, sped out of the building to the garage and pounded up the stairs to her Jeep, heart racing with anxiety. But she wasn’t thinking about Val; she was thinking about the twins. She knew police procedure as well as any cop. If Val were arrested, Max and Kyle would be carted off to Juvenile Hall by a matron and that could not be allowed to happen.
Victoria broke every speed limit in Dallas racing home. She burned a half inch of rubber off her rear tires as she took the corner onto the Jefferson Street viaduct, blasting past a Porsche Boxster like it was standing still, then roared across the old bridge, pushing the Jeep up to eighty miles an hour.
Along with the anxiety and fear for the twins’ safety, self-loathing chewed at the fringes of her thoughts, jaundicing her vision of herself as a mother. She hated herself for not being there. Cursed herself for having a career that she loved. She should have been there to protect the children. She knew these thoughts were irrational, but that hardly mattered; they felt true enough.
It almost made her scream to slow down to thirty-five miles an hour, still ten miles over the posted speed limit, as she entered her neighborhood, but it was a community of joggers, bikers and babies in strollers; she couldn’t take the chance of driving faster.
When she finally turned down her own street she saw a DPD patrol car parked at the curb in front of her house.
The fingernails of her un-bandaged hand bit into the steering wheel and her stomach clenched. Her first thought was that Val was probably handcuffed in the back seat. And then she saw Val chatting away with Jack Birch and a pair of uniformed officers. She didn’t recognize the taller of the two uniformed cops, but the other was Gary Griggs, one of Val’s boozin’ ‘n’ shootin’ buddies. They seemed to be having a good time, yukking it up.
Victoria’s panic instantly boiled over into anger. Val wasn’t even in handcuffs!
But she might be after she got done with him.
She whipped past the patrol car and screeched to a stop, almost taking off the cruiser’s front bumper. She leapt out of the Jeep before it had even stopped moving and was yelling before her heels hit the pavement.
“Where are the boys, Valentine?”
Val turned, still smiling, but the smile vanished when he saw Victoria barreling across the sidewalk like a runaway bus, shoulders up around her ears, chin tucked. He had the urge to grab Rodriquez and use him as a human shield.
“They’re fine!” he said, backing up a step, holding his hands up, palms out. “They’re inside. Taking a nap.”
“Damn it, Valentine!” she yelled, still charging straight at him. “You ditched them so you could play grab-ass with your buddies?”
“I didn’t ditch them,’ he said, taking another step backward. “They’re in their playpen taking their nap. The baby monitor’s right here.”
“They’re fine—” Griggs began but snapped his mouth shut when Victoria’s eyes raked over him.
&n
bsp; Victoria stopped just short of her husband and gave him a murderous look, her eyes pausing for the briefest of moments on the bandage over his right eye, before she turned on her heel and stalked across the front yard, brushing past Griggs who almost fell over himself getting out of her way.
“They’re fine,” Val said to her back. “What happened to your hand?”
Victoria thrust up her good hand without turning around, cutting him off mid-sentence.
Val knew better than to say another word. She was past the point of reason. Talking to her now was like having an argument with a guided missile. She pounded up the steps and banged through the door.
“I’ve got to have a few words with your wife, Valentine,” Jack said. “About Abby Sutton. It’s her case. For the moment anyway. How much of your part do you want to tell her yourself?” Both men knew that leaving anything out was not an option; Victoria had been a prosecuting attorney for too long, she’d find out everything eventually. It was better not to add more lies to the list of charges to be leveled against Val. She had to have the whole story.
But not from Val. He wasn’t too proud to run for cover when Victoria was this angry. Didn’t a wise sage once say ‘retreat and live to fight another day?’
That guy was probably a coward too.
“Tell her everything,” he told Jack. “And then say a prayer for me.”
Jack nodded. He crossed the lawn and went up the front steps.
“Christ, she scared me,” Rodriquez said as Jack disappeared inside. “I almost used the Taser on her.”