“I am,” Adam said. “I’m ready to face the shooter, but I want to choose where we meet. And it’s not going to be anywhere near you.”
For the first time, Carrie saw the pistol in Adam’s hand. “Is that . . . ?”
“Yes. It’s my gun.” He knelt and slid the pistol into a holster buckled above his right ankle. “And I’d feel better if you had one too.”
Carrie chose to ignore the remark. She didn’t want a weapon, and she wasn’t too happy that Adam had one. “Let’s go into the living room,” she said. “Do you want something to drink? Coffee?”
“I’d jump out of my skin if I had coffee,” Adam said. “Maybe a glass of ice water.”
In a moment they were settled side by side on the sofa in Carrie’s living room. “I think we both have news,” she said. “Who goes first?”
She wasn’t sure of the reason, maybe it was the cumulative stress of the past few days, but Adam seemed more preoccupied than usual. He snapped out of it long enough to say, “Why don’t you?”
Carrie described her visit to Calvin McDonald. “I don’t think he could be our shooter. And the more I think about it, the less certain I am that the attacks have been aimed at me.” She was ashamed that she felt a degree of relief at reaching this conclusion. “I believe we can strike Mr. McDonald and Mrs. Fremont and all the other patients and families who might have a grudge against me.”
“Good,” Adam said. “You haven’t discussed my real identity with anyone. Right?”
Carrie tried to keep her expression neutral. Just my best friend. But Julie has no reason to tell anyone. “No . . . Well, yes. I’ve talked to Julie Yates.” She saw Adam’s expression change, and her voice rose a bit. “Adam, she’s my best friend. I’d trust her with my life. And I had to talk with someone about this. Can you understand?”
Adam chewed on his lower lip. “I asked you not to tell anyone. Don’t you think it’s possible that Julie could tell her husband, who might mention it to a colleague, who could be an acquaintance—”
“Stop! Julie promised me she wouldn’t even tell her husband. I’m willing to bet my life that she’s kept the secret.”
“Actually, it’s my life we’re betting too . . . but, okay. I’ll accept that.”
“Thank you.”
“Let’s put that aside. I have a couple of things to share,” Adam said. He told her about his brother’s shooting. “He’s doing okay after surgery, but he’ll be out of circulation for several days. He was shot in the shoulder—the right shoulder—so if it comes down to a shoot-out, I won’t be able to depend on Dave for a while.”
“Was that what you’d planned?” Carrie asked. “Get your brother here, maybe a couple of his buddies, then face down your stalker like the gunfight at the OK Corral?” She knew there was sarcasm in her voice, but maybe it belonged there. Surely Adam wasn’t planning something like that.
“No, I don’t expect my brother to fight my battles for me. That’s not the way we grew up. Besides . . .” He touched his ankle where the pistol rested. “Although I hope it doesn’t come down to what you call the gunfight at the OK Corral, if it does I’m ready.”
“How else do you think we can resolve this?” Carrie asked.
“I plan to use the pistol to capture the shooter, not shoot him. I never thought I’d even own a gun. But I feel as though I’m backed into a corner, and I’ll do anything to defend you . . . to defend us.”
She patted his arm. Carrie decided it was time to move on to a topic that wouldn’t trigger an argument. “You said you had two things. What’s the second?”
Adam paused to think for a moment. “Oh, I called one of my law school classmates. Corky has a brilliant legal mind, but he also can coax all kinds of information out of a computer.”
“In other words, he’s a hacker.”
“He assures me that he could get all this information in a conventional manner. It would just take a lot longer. He describes it as taking a shortcut.” He took a deep swallow from his water glass, then set it on the coffee table in front of him. “I asked him to check out Charlie DeLuca for me.”
“Why?” Carrie said. “You worked with DeLuca. You were married to his daughter. Don’t you know enough about him?”
“I wanted a list of family and close friends, people who might be behind these attacks on me even though Charlie is dead.”
“Didn’t you meet all those folks at your wedding? Maybe at the rehearsal dinner? The reception?”
Adam grimaced. “Charlie said there was no need for a big fancy wedding. A judge in Chicago, one of Charlie’s cronies, married us in his chambers. My brother and the judge’s clerk were witnesses.”
“What did Bella say? Or Charlie’s wife?”
“They did what they’d learned to do—they kept their mouths shut.”
Carrie picked up a legal pad and wrote “Charlie DeLuca Family” at the top. “Okay, so what was Charlie’s wife’s name?”
“Doesn’t matter. Corky called me just before I came here. He only had a moment, but he told me Charlie’s wife died six months after he went to prison.” He picked up his glass, found it empty, and put it down again. “Charlie hadn’t been what you’d call a model prisoner. He was in solitary confinement at the time, so he didn’t get to go to her funeral.”
Carrie shuddered. This was the man responsible for attacks on her life, yet she found herself feeling sorry for him. “So we have ‘wife—deceased’ and ‘daughter.’ Do we know anything about Bella’s whereabouts?”
Adam described the dead end Corky encountered in that respect. “It’s ‘like she dropped off the face of the earth’ was the way he put it. His best guess was that after the divorce and her father’s prison sentence, Bella moved, established a new identity, and we’ll never find her.”
“But if she showed up here, you’d recognize her.”
“Right. I don’t think there’s a plastic surgeon anywhere who could change her appearance enough that I wouldn’t recognize my ex-wife.”
Carrie said, “Who else?”
“Charlie apparently had an older brother, but he managed to tiptoe through society without leaving a footprint. No Social Security number, no driver’s license—at least, not in his original name. My guess is that he wanted to distance himself from his black sheep brother. Maybe, the same way we suspect Bella did, he wanted to wipe the slate clean. He just did it a lot earlier.”
Carrie looked at the almost-blank page in front of her. “What about close friends?”
Adam shook his head. “Nope. Charlie didn’t have close friends. He had people who worked for him, people who owed him favors, but any loyalty they had to him probably died when he did, if not before.”
Carrie dropped the pad and threw up her hands in surrender. “So I guess that’s it. We have no knowledge of anyone connected to Charlie DeLuca who might be trying to get back at you on his behalf.”
“I didn’t say that,” Adam said, raising an eyebrow.
Carrie studied him for a moment. “Okay . . . ,” she finally said. “What?”
“Apparently one family wasn’t enough for Charlie DeLuca . . . He had two!”
EIGHTEEN
ADAM WATCHED CARRIE’S FACE AS HE DROPPED THE BOMBSHELL on her, and he wasn’t disappointed. Her jaw dropped like a fish gasping on dry land. He couldn’t recall ever seeing someone so totally surprised. Then again, he’d been just as surprised when Corky mentioned DeLuca’s second family.
“I think you’d better explain,” Carrie said.
“Most of this is conjecture, but it makes sense. Charlie’s wife—Bella’s mother—was something of a shrew. Charlie’s law practice and shadier activities often took him to Cicero, which is sort of a suburb of Chicago. That’s where he met a woman who was clerking for a judge—maybe a judge Charlie or one of his associates had ‘bought,’ so to speak. They started seeing each other, and he eventually married her.”
“Didn’t his wife—either wife, for that matter—didn’t they suspec
t anything?”
“Not at all. Charlie split his time pretty evenly, and each wife was told his absences were because of business trips.”
Carrie picked up her legal pad again. “So what was his name in Cicero?”
Adam grinned. “Charlie DeLuca.”
“You’re kidding! I can’t believe it. He had a second family, a few miles away from the first, both of them under his real name? The man was either incredibly stupid or incredibly confident.”
“My personal opinion? He was both.”
Adam watched as Carrie wrote “second family” and drew a line under it. Then he told her what Corky had found. Charlie’s double life remained undiscovered until after he was about to go on trial. When the second wife learned the truth and realized the second marriage was invalid, she retook her maiden name, found a job at the courthouse, and closed that chapter of her life.
“So she’s not going to want revenge,” Carrie said.
“Maybe on Charlie, not on me.”
“Did they have any children?”
“She had two from a previous marriage—a son and daughter, both grown.”
Under “second family”, Carrie wrote “son” and “daughter.”
“Before you get too carried away with that list, you’d better hear what we know about the children.” Adam leaned forward with his clasped hands between his knees. “As best we can tell, the daughter was terribly disturbed by what happened. So disturbed, as a matter of fact, that she entered the novitiate for the Franciscan Sisters. She’s currently at Our Lady of Victory Convent in Lemont, not far from Chicago.”
Carrie pursed her lips and drew a line through “daughter.” “So what about the son.”
“He disappeared.”
“Don’t tell me he followed his sister’s example and went into a monastery.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was working in a hospital in Cicero and going to night school, getting his certification as an Emergency Medical Technician. After he finished his training, he went to work driving an ambulance there. Then, about a week after the bigamy came to light, he simply didn’t show up for work. There’s no trace of him since then, at least not by his real name.”
“So at least we have one possible out of that list,” Carrie said. “What was his name?”
“The name he was born with is Robert Kohler. But we have no idea what he goes by now.”
Adam expected Carrie to write down the name. Instead, she gripped the pen so tightly her knuckles turned white. Then she looked up at him and said, “I may know.”
Carrie wondered if she was jumping to conclusions. Then again, the pieces seemed to fit together. Adam came to Jameson about eight months ago. Within a few weeks Rob Cole showed up, working as an EMT. About the time it was evident that Adam and Carrie had become an item, Rob started showing more interest in Carrie. She’d thought at first it was infatuation on his part. Now she wondered if it was an attempt to get close to her in order to keep tabs on Adam.
“You’re going to think this is crazy,” she said.
“No crazier than someone shooting at me—at us. Let’s hear it.”
Carrie laid out her theory about Rob, watching Adam’s face carefully. To his credit, he neither interrupted nor argued. Instead, he listened thoughtfully until he was sure she’d finished.
“Let’s look at it objectively.” Adam picked up Carrie’s pad and pen and wrote “Rob Cole” toward the middle of the page. “There are three things the law looks for in the commission of a crime: motive, means, opportunity. Let’s take them in reverse order.” Under Rob’s name, he scribbled the words movie, office, hospital 1, hospital 2. “Let’s look at opportunity for each of these episodes.”
“I’m with you,” Carrie said.
Adam poised his pen over the first line in the list. “So could Rob have shot at us in front of the theater?”
“I don’t see why not. Actually, I suppose anyone could.”
Adam made a check mark. “Could he have lobbed that Molotov cocktail through the front window of the law offices?”
“Same answer.”
Another check mark. “Now we begin to narrow the field. Could he have sent the text that lured me to the hospital parking lot?”
Carrie thought about that for a moment. “Yes. Rob’s in and out of the ER all the time. He’d know about the locker where my phone was. And he’d be familiar with the property, including where you’d park if you came to the ER.”
A third check mark. “And the shooting in the hospital parking lot?”
“Of course.” She waited while Adam made the final check. “You said he was in dark clothes that night, but not in uniform. We have only his word that he likes to hang around the ER when he’s off duty. He could have followed us from the restaurant, shot at me—”
“We’ve also said that could have been a mistake,” Adam said. “Maybe he thought he was shooting at me.”
“And when you emerged from the darkness carrying me, he saw what he’d done. So he ran to help you.”
Adam ran his finger down the check marks. “All right, we know he had the opportunity. The means presents no real problem here. That leaves motive.”
“If he’s Charlie DeLuca’s stepson from that second marriage . . . We don’t know that he is, but if that’s true we should be able to connect the dots.”
“We need to find out if Rob Cole was originally Rob Kohler,” Adam said.
Carrie nodded. She knew two things: that it would be up to her to get that information from Rob, and that she dreaded the encounter.
It was well after midnight before they agreed that their brains were no longer functional. Adam paused by Carrie’s kitchen door and wondered if she’d ever forgive him for getting her into this. His doubts were erased by the hug and kiss she delivered, followed by the whispered admonition, “Be careful.”
“I will,” he assured her.
“And call me when you’re safely home.”
“I’ll make it short. If our friend, the stalker, has some sort of way to track me via my cell phone, that would at least make it less likely he’ll know that I’m in my apartment.”
Adam slid out the door and ran in a crouch toward the six-foot-high wood fence that separated Carrie’s backyard from the alley. The slats were fastened to two horizontal rails. Adam put his toe on the lower of the two boards, grasped the top of the fence, and pulled himself to the top. He rolled over and landed on the narrow strip of grass that separated the fence from the paved alley.
He took a minute to catch his breath, then worked his way slowly through the alleys toward where he’d left his car. The neighborhood was dark. Although there were street lamps in the area, there were none in the alleys. Adam was sure some homes had motion-triggered lights in the backyards, but the fences shielded his movements, so he remained in darkness. The occasional bark of a dog signaled his passing, but he kept moving.
He emerged from the last alley and scanned the area where his vehicle was parked. Other cars sat silent nearby, but all of them were empty—or if there were occupants, they were hidden. Adam gave it a few minutes. He heard no sound, saw no movement. No telltale embers of cigarettes glowed anywhere. The last thought made Adam smile, as he visualized a man clothed in black, lurking in the darkness, smoking a cigarette, occasionally fingering the gun tucked into his belt. You’ve seen too many late-night movies on TV.
He hurried to his car and unlocked it with his key to avoid the beep and flashing lights of the security system. He eased into the driver’s seat, glad he’d remembered to remove the bulb from the interior light. He pulled the door closed gently and relocked it. He didn’t turn on his headlights until he was half a block away. Then he went through a series of turns to make certain no one was following him. The drivers of the few cars he encountered seemed more interested in getting to their destination than pursuing Adam.
As he pulled into the parking lot behind his apartment, he killed the headlights and scanned the area. He�
��d made an effort to memorize as many as possible of the cars normally parked there, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Rather than taking his numbered slot, he chose a visitor’s space toward the end of the row. He recalled his brother’s warning about the dangers of predictability. If unpredictability meant being exposed for a longer walk to his back door, so be it.
Before he opened the car door, he pulled up his right pants leg and slid the pistol from its holster. If he was going to need it, now would be the time. Much like a coach giving a pep talk, he reminded himself that although he wasn’t a killer, he was the target of one. And if he had to shoot to defend himself, he would.
He eased out of the car and locked it with the key. Adam looked around once more. Nothing moved.
He strode purposefully toward the back door of his apartment and was halfway there when gunfire from behind a Dumpster to his left made him drop to the ground. Two shots in rapid succession were followed by the scream of a car alarm. Adam stood up, pointed his pistol at the area where he’d seen the muzzle flashes, and pulled the trigger twice.
He heard the whine of a car engine revving, the screech of tires on pavement. He got a fleeting glimpse of a bulky vehicle, probably a light-colored SUV, exiting the parking lot. Adam took that as his cue. Already lights were popping on in the apartment building. Witnesses would emerge in a moment, and the police wouldn’t be far behind. He sprinted for his apartment, opened the back door, and tumbled inside in one motion. Adam moved toward the center of the apartment, but not before he engaged both the door’s lock and deadbolt. Then he duck-walked to an interior wall and eased down against it, trying to catch his breath.
Returning fire had been a reflex, and now Adam wondered at the wisdom of his action. He realized he could have injured, even killed an innocent bystander. Moreover, now the assailant knew Adam was armed. Would that make him even more dangerous?
Should he clear out again, move to another motel? If he stayed, was he endangering his neighbors? He decided that the shooter was unlikely to return that night, so it was probably safe to stay here for the time being. Tomorrow . . . well, he’d decide that after the sun came up.
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