by Harvey, JM
That spooked her! Her shoulders hunched and she shrank back against the counter, her eyes spinning around the room, coming to rest on the doorway that led to the front hall. Her ears rang with the effort to hear footsteps creeping up on her; a gun being cocked, the snick of a knife blade.
“Thanks a lot, Jack,” she whispered then clicked off the phone. She stood there for several minutes listening to the whisper of traffic from the street out front and the creaks and sighs of the old home settling into soil dehydrated from months of drought. The quiet calmed her nerves. A little. She knew, rationally, that a murderer with any sense would be long gone by now, but most murderers didn’t have good sense. If they did, they wouldn’t be murderers.
But she wasn’t leaving. Not yet. She slung her purse over her shoulder and headed for the back hallway, back to Herby’s office.
What she was about to do could get her arrested.
Or worse.
47
The memories rushed over Valentine like a torrent of sewage - memories he had dodged for four years. He hadn’t wanted to recall that day or the things that Lamar and Lemuel had done in the basement. But it wasn’t just what Lamar and Lemuel had done; it was what he had done himself. He had executed the Suttons. Murdered them. It was that simple. And it was that fact that had lurked in the periphery of his mind twenty-four-seven, a red-eyed monster leering from the shadows, a constant reminder of the violence that lay at the heart of who he was - the same violence that had driven the killers he had once hunted.
Val had told the real story only once before, from his ICU bed two days after the incident, to the division captain, Jed Larkin. Jed’s complexion had faded to the color of ashes by the time Val had finished, but he hadn’t said anything in reply. Jed had clicked the digital recorder off, stood and left without a word. Two days later, a patrol woman had brought Val the transcribed report to sign. He had read it through while she waited. His description of Lamar and Lemuel’s last moments had been excised, replaced with a bullshit last stand, like something out of a novel. Valentine signed it anyway and agreed, tacitly, to pretend it was the truth.
Until now.
Val mentally shook himself. Self-loathing and self-pity would have to wait. He had come to the Suttons’ house with a purpose. He flicked on the flashlight and crossed the living room, picking his way through the debris of plaster and broken lathing. He continued down the hallway to the kitchen. It had received the same destructive treatment. The cabinets had been ripped down, the walls gutted, the linoleum peeled up in two long sheets. A dark stain blotted the exposed wood flooring near the kitchen doorway. Abby Sutton’s dried blood. It was a wonder she hadn’t died right there.
Val turned and crossed the hallway to the closed basement door. He had kicked that door off its hinges four years before, but someone had re-hung it, though the doorjamb was still broken, the lock mechanism and doorknob gone. A faded strip of yellow crime scene tape dangled from one side of the doorframe, the words POLICE barely legible. Val pushed the bottom of the door with the toe of his shoe and it swung inward with a dry sigh. The smell of damp, musty earth rose to his nose. The odor of blood had long faded, but he could still smell it there, under the damp and dry rot. He pointed the flashlight down the steps. Cobwebs hung in broken tendrils from the rafters above the stairs marking a path where someone had recently descended.
With the flashlight in one hand and the cocked .45 in the other, Val went down the stairs slowly, panning the light about the small room as he went, picking out places in the walls where the concrete had been hammered to bits. The dirt floor had been torn up with shovels; it was dotted with shallow holes and piles of loose earth. It must have taken hours to do this much damage and more hours to destroy the house above. Someone had been looking for the money.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked around, the .45 tracking the flashlight’s beam. There was no evidence of the violence that had occurred here. No markers or flowers on the spot where the women had died, their bodies torn apart by a pair of raping murderers. Val’s eyes hit the spot where he had shot and killed the defenseless Lemuel. He stared at it for a long moment, reliving it one more time, but even here, in the basement where it had happened, he could muster no shame.
“You got better than you deserved,” he said aloud, a half-hearted defense for an unforgivable act. His hand squeezed down on the .45, the checkered grip digging into his palm. The cool air of the basement was suddenly chilly. He turned his back on the room and climbed the stairs.
There was nothing here for him.
He exited the Suttons’ house to find a DPD blue and white parked out front at the curb. Behind the wheel, his beefy arm propped on the open window, Gary Griggs was seated, staring across the overgrown yard at Val. He didn’t bother to climb out as Val approached.
“Taking a stroll down memory lane, Vicious?” Gary asked, squinting against the glare of the sun. Gary was sweating, despite the fact that the patrol car’s air-conditioner was going full blast with every vent aimed at the driver’s seat. His face was beaded with perspiration and the collar of his dark blue uniform was soaked.
Val looked over his shoulder at the house and shrugged.
“It all started here, Gary,” he said simply. Griggs nodded and for a moment both men were silent, reliving that day. Finally Val asked, “What brings you out here? This is still the Sheriff’s turf, isn’t it?”
Griggs nodded. “The Sheriff’s Department got a call about a suspicious car cruising the neighborhood,” he said. “They sent out an ‘any officer in the area.’ I was a couple miles away…” He shrugged and his eyes shifted to the house behind Val. For another long moment neither of them said anything.
Gary broke the silence. “I didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said and Val immediately knew what he was talking about. “I thought you were dead when I rolled up. All that blood…” Gary trailed off with a shake of his head. “The Suttons,” he said, grinding the words out. “Animals, every one of them.”
“I would have been dead if you hadn’t gotten here when you did.”
Gary made no reply to that. He put the patrol car in gear. “You have any more trouble out of Daddy Sutton?” he asked, his foot resting on the brake.
“No,” Val lied. Gary was still a cop. Val would not involve him in this. It would be asking too much, but he was sorely tempted.
“I got to roll, but call me if you need me,” Gary said as he pulled away from the curb, the driver’s side window already rising.
Val watched Gary until the patrol car had made the corner at the end of the block, then he retraced his steps across the Suttons’ lawn. He squeezed through the redbud hedge, ducked into the dilapidated carport and climbed into the Mustang, but he didn’t start the engine. He slouched behind the wheel, sweating in the stuffy heat. Thinking about the money. And the gold. For two days he had been thinking that if he could only find the gold all of this would be over. The irrationality of that plan was finally hitting home, but still he couldn’t shake it.
Right. All he had to do was find a load of untraceable gold and cash that had eluded dozens of experienced police officers, insurance investigators and Treasury Agents. They had X-rayed the walls, seismically mapped the lawn and probed the basement’s concrete block walls with steel drilling rods. None of them had ever found a trace of the cash. Not one bill. Not a single coin. So, what chance did Val have?
But it has to be here, he thought. Close by. As Jasper Smith had said, Lamar wouldn’t have trusted anyone to hold that much cash. No one was more suspicious than a thief. The Sutton boys would have kept it in a location they could control and protect. Someplace they could watch 24/7. But where? Several million dollars in small bills was one hell of a lot of paper. And the gold coins that had been taken from Martinson’s Wholesale Gold had been estimated to weigh close to three hundred pounds. How much space would that much loot take up? Most of the currency had been stolen from drug dealer and other criminals. That
meant it would be mainly small bills. If you assumed it was two or three million in cash, then you’d have a stack of bills maybe five feet square. And the gold coins? What did that much gold look like? He couldn’t even make a guesstimate, but he knew where he could get a precise answer.
Val started the car and backed down the driveway. He stopped with the rear of the Mustang blocking the southbound side of the street and looked at the Suttons’ old hideout one last time.
Everything had changed that day. His life as he knew it had ended, but he had rebuilt it. Refocused. Married and had children. But, he knew now, he would never escape that basement. He’d never be free of Lamar and Lemuel.
Their ghosts would haunt him for the rest of his life.
48
Victoria retraced her steps down the dark hallway to Herby’s office, the journey twice as sinister as the first time she had made the trip. This time she knew what awaited her. Her empty stomach knotted itself into a chilly ball and her breath came faster as the sweat on her brow went frigid despite the stuffy heat.
She could smell Herby and Foster long before she reached the half-open door, the thick, metallic odor of a slaughterhouse. She swallowed hard, fighting the gag reflex, and began to breathe through her mouth. She stepped into the darkened office and stopped just inside, her eyes on Herby’s slumped silhouette.
Paperwork splattered with blood lay spread out across the desk before Herby. She approached the desk, but she couldn’t read them upside down. Carefully, she circled the desk, watching for blood splatter. She had to step over Debbie Foster. Victoria was unable to avert her eyes from the deputy’s pasty, lifeless features. Foster had said she was getting married next week. The opening strains of the wedding march echoed in Victoria’s head. She jerked her gaze away. She couldn’t afford to get sentimental. She couldn’t break down. She continued behind the desk, circling wide around the trail of wreckage left by the bullet that had blasted through Herby’s forehead at three thousand feet per second.
The hole in the back of Herby’s head was massive. Half his skull was gone. Gray brain matter speckled the dark leather of his chair. Victoria’s gorge rose again, her empty stomach clutching and lunging, but she choked it down. She averted her eyes as she sidled up close behind Herby and peered over his right shoulder.
The papers piled and scattered across the desk were all lawyerly documentation, briefs and motions, witness lists and printouts of case law. Victoria leaned in closer, not really sure what she was hoping to find, just scanning the documents for familiar names. A pair of dope cases, a DUI and an assault and battery was all she saw. Nothing about Rankin or the Suttons. Nothing that helped her. That left the desk drawers.
Victoria eased around the chair and reached for the top drawer on the right side of Herby’s desk, accidentally bumping Herby’s chair with her hip in the process. The chair shifted a fraction of an inch, just enough to unbalance Herby. He toppled forward, his weight shifting slowly, like a potato sack falling off a truck. Victoria instinctively made a grab for his shoulder, but he was far too heavy. He slipped right through her grasp. His head thumped down on the desk calendar and blood rushed from his broken skull like wine from a spilled cup.
The smell of all that blood clogged Victoria’s throat. She spun away, retching, buckling at the waist, though her stomach was already empty. She stayed that way for a long, shaky moment, bent at the waist, her head close to her knees, as nausea washed over her in waves. Finally, her stomach settled back to a seasick roll and she could stand again. She turned back to the desk and shuddered. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was get out of there. Away from the gore and the blood. She couldn’t take it. She’d leave this to Jack.
Victoria backed away, but stopped when her eyes fell on a green folder peeking out from under Herby’s left buttock.
Why would Herby have put the file under his butt when he had an acre of desk in front of him? To hide it from Foster? Or from the killer who had murdered both Herby and Foster? Victoria had already thoroughly implicated herself beyond explanation; her fingerprints were everywhere and her DNA was in the sink. She didn’t have anything left to lose. She reached down, grabbed the corner of the folder and tugged, grimacing with distaste when it refused to budge. She pulled harder and jerked it free.
She opened the folder. It wasn’t more than a dozen pages. She didn’t want to read it there with two corpses for company, but she had to. She couldn’t take it with her. She had already deeply compromised the crime scene, but stealing evidence was a step too far. She turned toward the weak light coming through the dingy window behind Herby’s desk, and started to read. It took her less than ten seconds to identify what she was looking at, but it only confused her more.
The first pages in the bundle were the appointment papers for a Political Action Committee called Citizens for Law and Order. The paperwork was a copy of the County filing documents. That meant the CLO PAC was a specific use PAC, supporting a single candidate or issue. She scanned down the page and saw who the PAC’s beneficiary was: Sheriff Nolan Swisher.
Her heart fell. This was no smoking gun; every candidate had a PAC or was supported by a PAC, sometimes more than one. She flipped the page and found the paperwork for an electronic filing exemption. That stirred her suspicion. A PAC could only file for that kind of exemption if it could prove that it had no access to computers or the internet, an unbelievable assertion in this technological age. She could think of only one reason to avoid electronic filing: fear of leaving a digital trail. The next two pages deepened her suspicion. One was the Pre-Election Contribution Report required by the County electoral commission. It had been filed just three weeks before the election and listed two-thousand-seventy dollars as the total assets of the PAC, less than a pittance in political terms. The second page was a post-election contribution summary that showed a balance of close to five million dollars. The Sheriff had managed to collect all that cash in a little less than three weeks? She’d call bullshit on that; something was definitely fishy. The next two pages were lists of expenditures, withdrawals and receipts. Local TV ads made up the bulk of the expenses, almost four million dollars. Victoria remembered the attack ads Sheriff Swisher had ran, advertisements that had helped the aging lawman landslide his way into another term. But there was a problem with all the paperwork: none of it had been signed or notarized.
Victoria flipped to the last page, her eyes freezing on the final line, where the treasurer had signed. Herby Lubbock’s flourish of a signature took up half the width of the page. A defense counsel as treasurer of the Sheriff’s PAC? That wasn’t possible; the conflict of interest would have been enough to draw outrage from every quarter. Swisher must be—
A sound from the front of the house broke her concentration and made her head jerk up. The front door opened and closed followed by the drone of a pair of voices. Two men locked in a whispered conversation. A whispered conversation that reached her thanks to the echoing quality of the main hallway.
For a moment, Victoria forgot to breathe. It had to be Herby’s and Foster’s killers. Jack had been right: this wasn’t a shootout, it was a double homicide!
She folded the sheaf of paperwork into a fat square and stuffed it into her back pocket, no longer concerned about tampering with evidence. She ditched the empty folder on the corner of Herby’s desk, circled the desk and crossed quickly to the hallway door. She ducked her head out to peer down the corridor and could hear the voices more clearly, but she still couldn’t make out the words. It was two men arguing, their voices low but intense. It sounded as if they were still in the front hallway.
Victoria slipped out the door and crept down the dim corridor, keeping close to the wall, moving as fast as she dared, her sandals whispering across the dusty wood parquet. If she could make the kitchen door…
The voices suddenly stopped and so did she, halfway through a step, her left foot raised off the floor.
The two men’s footsteps echoed hollowly off the front hall’s wooden flo
or as they moved toward the kitchen, coming closer. They started talking again, their words coming clearer with every step.
“—I don’t know,” one of the men said. His voice was deep with an East Texas twang. Pure peckerwood. “Could be anywhere. I told you we should have opened the safe before we killed him.”
“I didn’t think he’d lie,” the other man said defensively, and Victoria’s mouth dropped open. She almost said ‘no’ out loud before her hand leapt to her mouth, clamping icy fingers over her lips.
“He knew we’d kill him if he lied,” Laroy Hockley continued. There was no mistake, it was him.
Jesus. Laroy Hockley a murderer. Despite her dislike for Laroy, it still felt like having a part of her childhood put to the torch.
“Hell, he knew you’d kill him if he told the truth. Christ, you had already shot Foster. Herby was just buying a little more air for his self, that’s all.” The peckerwood paused, but just for a moment. “Wasn’t no need for that, you know. Killing him, that is. Doesn’t make good business sense. Having an attorney in your hip pocket was a pretty good deal.”
“He was falling apart. He would have taken us down with him,” Laroy replied defensively.
As the men came nearer, Victoria faded back toward Herby’s office, looking for an escape route that she knew wasn’t there. The corridor was a dead end, Herby’s door the last one in the row. With nowhere else to go, she ducked back into the office, eased the door back to its half-closed position then turned and looked wildly around the room. Her eyes stopped on the window behind the desk. She could hear Laroy and his partner coming down the back hallway, now. There was no way she’d get the window open, climb out and get gone before they arrived. That left only one option. A really bad one. The closet to the left of Herby’s desk.
She quickly circled the desk and opened the closet door to find a narrow space stuffed with coats and sweaters on hangers. The floor was a snarl of rundown boots and dirty old shoes. The smell of cedar was almost overwhelming as she slithered through the curtain of coats and into the far corner of the closet, pulling the door softly closed behind her.