by Jeff Gunhus
Allison glared at Garret. She always hated the way he talked about victims like they were a personal inconvenience to him. Even though she knew it was a coping mechanism to deal with all the horrific death around him on a daily basis, it didn’t make it any less insulting.
“Tell me what you need from me,” Allison said, wanting to get away from Garret as soon as possible. “Mason sent a plane for me and I don’t want to keep it waiting.”
Garret’s face fell, not even bothering to hide his jealousy.
“You know the drill,” he said. “I’ll walk each of you through separately. We’ll take it step-by-step, piece together how this went down. After that, I won’t need you anymore.”
“Sounds good,” Allison said. “I’ll want to talk to Sheriff Frank before I leave.”
“Negative,” Garret said.
“Excuse me?”
“My site. I’m SAC,” Garret said. “I don’t want you talking to the locals. They deal with me direct, got it?”
“Garret, you know what––”
Mike put a hand on her shoulder and she stopped.
“C’mon,” Mike said. “Like you said, you don’t want to keep the plane waiting. Get home to your dad,” he prompted.
Allison nodded, stuffing her anger back inside.
“OK, let’s get this over with.”
“Good girl,” Garret said. “Nice to see a man finally able to rein you in. This way. Start from when you walked into the warehouse.”
Allison bit her tongue at the comment. She knew Garret was just trying to get a rise out of her and she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. She followed him back to the main entrance to the warehouse, both of them hobbling like crippled penguins on their bum legs. Mike drifted off to hang out with a few of the other agents that were part of Garret’s team. She noticed that he seemed to know everyone, calling the agents by their first names and falling into easy conversations as if he had just met some buddies at a neighborhood bar instead of a crime scene for a double homicide.
“So, you and Mike, huh?” Garret asked.
“What?” Allison said, realizing she’d been caught staring after Mike. She regained her footing and shot him a look. “Why? Jealous?” It was petty, but Garret had that effect on her. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t strike me as the monogamous type. I’m sure he’ll still call you.”
Garret just grunted his disapproval and pointed at the warehouse door.
“Walk me through it. Approximately what time did you enter the warehouse?”
Allison forced herself to concentrate and started the walk-through. She did her best to describe what happened, careful not to overstate what she saw or thought she saw at any given point. That was the classic issue with eyewitness reports. People in high-stress situations tend to blend what they feared they would see with what they actually saw. One eyewitness might see the suspect with a gun in their hand while another eyewitness with the same vantage point might see a knife. Both would pass a polygraph that they were one hundred percent certain of what they saw, so who was lying? Neither one. They saw what their brain interpreted.
Even armed with this knowledge, Allison fought to separate out what she actually saw versus what her mind told her she saw.
They followed her path across the warehouse floor. The pool of her dried blood where Harris shot her was taped off as part of the scene investigation. They both looked at it for a long second. She expected Garret to crack some wiseass remark, but he didn’t. Instead, he marked the moment by nodding with a kind of grudging respect, then quickly moved on.
Together, they stood outside the container where she’d hid and talked about where she thought Harris was located during that time. They talked about the possibility of there being a second shooter. There was no evidence so far of one, but that was one of the reasons for the investigation. She did her best to recall where Harris had been while he was goading Mike to come out of hiding. She replayed in her head some of the things he’d said.
You went to go look for young Natalie’s computer. Am I right?
Do you have the laptop?
That was the whole reason Harris had summoned them to the warehouse. He thought Mike had possession of the computer. She imagined the fire at the house again, saw Mike in the room beneath her, bent over as he ran through the fire. To her eye, it looked like he was just protecting himself from the blaze. But maybe she’d just seen what she wanted to see. If Mike did have the laptop, he likely would have covered it with his arms and run hunched over. And if he had the laptop, then––
“You still with me, McNeil?” Garret asked.
She refocused her attention. “Sure, a little foggy from the hospital is all.”
“Need a break?”
On reflex, she thought of a comeback, thinking Garret was insinuating something about her strength or her grit. But there was none of that on his face. He didn’t have a look of actual concern, but there was no judgment there either. Professional courtesy was the best description and even that blew her mind.
“Thanks, Garret,” she said. “But I’m fine. Let’s keep going.”
They followed her path after leaving the container, under the balcony and into the back office where Natalie had been tortured. The tips of her toes were no longer lined up on the table. She knew they would have been photographed and then carefully placed into an evidence bag. Still, four circles of blood still dotted the table and made her stomach turn.
Allison left the room as quickly as she could and walked outside. The sun blazed and she squinted against the sudden glare. After her eyes adjusted, she saw the outline of two bodies on the ground.
“Which one was Natalie?” she asked.
Garret pointed to the one on the left. Allison walked up and bent down to the ground, awkwardly balancing with her crutches. She knew Garret was likely cataloging all the ways she was too soft to do the job, too emotionally invested, but she didn’t care. She’d let Natalie down and the girl was dead because of it.
She heard Harris’s voice again.
My employer hired me to get every copy.
My employer.
That was the phrase she’d been keyed on over the last couple of hours, especially since her conversation with Mason promising he had a lead on who’d hired Harris.
But now that she was on the scene and thinking it through, she remembered Harris had said something before that. Something important.
I have the backup hard drive.
My employer hired me to get every copy.
I have the backup hard drive.
She turned to Garret. “Where’s the hard drive?”
Garret looked puzzled. “Are you talking about this mysterious laptop you and Mike say you were hunting down?”
“No, Harris was looking for the laptop. He thought Mike had it. But he said he already had the backup hard drive.”
“We didn’t find any hard drive,” Garret said. “The team’s doing a perimeter search now, but they’ve already gone over the immediate scene.”
“No, he would have had it on him,” she said. She pointed to the car. “He was leaving so he wouldn’t have stashed it anywhere.”
Garret looked annoyed. “I’ll talk to the locals again, but they didn’t say they found anything. But that Sheriff Frank was a real pain in the ass.”
“Pretty big deal to hold back evidence like that, even for him,” Allison said. “Sounds like a stretch.”
“He was pretty pissed about jurisdiction. We had words,” Garret said.
Allison nodded, imagining that it hadn’t been a pretty sight between the two men. She didn’t believe Frank would blatantly tamper with evidence like that, but something didn’t add up. Harris had no upside from claiming to Mike and Allison that he had a backup hard drive, so why would he have bothered unless it was true? And then there was Harris’s certainty that Mike had possession of the laptop. So certain that he’d risked giving away his position and called the FBI to come meet him. But why? Mike had assured h
er that he’d been bluffing that he had the laptop during his exchange with Harris. He seemed believable, maybe because she really wanted to trust him, but there was a nagging doubt eating away at her. Maybe he had recovered something in the fire. Maybe the nice-guy routine was just a cover for the reporter looking for the exclusive scoop.
Outside of Mike, there was something else bothering her. The bad guy was in a body bag in the local morgue, but she held no misconception that her job was done.
As far as she was concerned, this wasn’t over until she found out who had hired Harris.
“How’s the leg feeling?” Mike asked, coming up behind them.
Allison leaned on her crutches, noticing the pain a lot more once he mentioned something. She felt the OxyContin in her pocket and thought about taking one. But she wanted to keep her head clear so she resisted the urge.
“Not great actually,” she said. “Feels like someone shot me.”
“C’mon, Garret,” Mike said, looking more concerned than amused at her attempt at humor. “Give her a break and wrap this up, huh? Girl’s got a plane to catch.”
Garret’s face clouded over. Allison wasn’t sure if it was because of Mike going to bat for her or because he knew that Mason had sent his private plane to pick her up and deliver her back to DC.
“Give me the play by play of the last part,” he said. “Your statement is a little confusing here. You had a gun on Harris. He had the hostage. Then what?”
Allison’s mind went back to the moments before she was shot. Natalie crying. Harris forcing the gun under the girl’s chin.
“He had her. There was no way to disarm him. No doubt in my mind that he would kill her unless I put down my gun.”
“And where were you?” Garret asked, looking at Mike.
“I thought you wanted to do this separately,” Mike said.
“You’re the one complaining about getting her out of here,” he replied, an edge to his voice.
Mike looked at Allison, clearly uncomfortable. “I was in the doorway, watching the whole thing. I really thought that if she could get the killer in the open, then I could take the shot.”
“So McNeil puts her gun down,” Garret said. “Thinking you’re going to stop him before he shoots.”
“Yes,” replied Allison, trying hard to keep her voice from shaking. It was less than twelve hours since Natalie had begged her for help. Since Harris had turned the gun on her and slammed two bullets into her chest. “I thought it was the only chance to save Natalie.”
Garret sniffed the air derisively as if to say, Well, that didn’t work out so well, now did it? If Mike hadn’t been there, she had no doubt the son of a bitch would have said the words out loud.
“So when Allison threw her gun down, Harris shot Natalie in the leg, then came at Allison.” Garret looked up from his notes. “So you had a shot on him? Before he fired at McNeil?”
Allison had already played the event out in her head a hundred times while lying in the hospital bed. She’d interviewed a hundred people after traumatic experiences and it was common for them to not remember anything in the minutes leading up to the event. Even people recovering from car crashes reported blank spots in their memory in the minutes before impact. It was as if the brain pressed the delete button on the incident for its own protection and scrubbed some of the extra data before just to be sure.
She remembered Natalie’s face, she would always remember that. And she remembered Mike in the door behind her and the sense that there was a way out.
“I jumped to the right,” Allison said, moving that direction. “That’s the last I remember.”
Mike stepped out from behind the pole and also went right. “I broke the same way so Allison was between me and Harris,” Mike said. “I tried to maneuver to get a shot, but by the time I did, Harris started firing. First at Allison. Then one shot at Natalie.”
“Two shots to the chest,” Garret said. “You’re just damn lucky he saved the head shot for the Bain girl.”
Allison swallowed hard and felt a little dizzy. She had to lean more on her crutches. Of course she’d thought about that before, but standing in the spot where she’d come so close to dying affected her more than she imagined it would. Little sensory details of the night flooded back to her, disjointed, out of order. Harris holding Natalie hostage. The girl’s dismembered toes lined up in a row. The bullets hitting her vest like a pair of flying sledgehammers.
But inside all of that, there was something else she couldn’t put her finger on. Something in her gut that told her she was missing something important. She’d learned long ago to trust her instincts, but how could she trust them if they were giving her no more than a vague feeling?
She hung her head, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. Dark bands appeared around her peripheral vision and the white gravel she was standing on seemed to pulse with each beat of her heart.
“Are you all right?” Mike said, his voice echoing.
She cleared her head and discovered she was hanging from her crutches, facing the ground, breathing hard. Mike’s hand was under her arm, propping her up. He took the small bag she carried over one shoulder.
She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. A little light-headed is all.”
“What else do you need, Garret?” Mike asked.
Garret looked smug, as if he’d won something, but Allison didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of there. She was thankful Mike was there. In the two men’s relationship, Mike, although younger than Garret, had the role of the big brother. Garret was on his best behavior and even at that he was still a prick.
“C’mon, man, she’s already walked you through everything,” Mike said.
Garret closed his notebook and nodded to the sedan parked in the back gravel lot. “Martell will drive you to the airport,” he said. “I’ll want to talk to you again in DC.”
“I’m going to walk her to the car,” Mike said. “Be right back.”
Garret looked even more annoyed. He pulled out two pieces of paper and laid them flat on his notebook. “Neither of you signed your statements.”
“Can’t we do that later?”
“It’s a private plane,” Garret said, sounding like a child. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Allison grabbed Garret’s pen and signed hers and Mike did the same.
“I forgot you were a lefty, Mike,” Garret said, angling the notebook the other direction so he could sign the statement more easily. “Probably why you’re part of the liberal press.”
Allison glanced down as Mike signed his statement. It hadn’t struck her before that Mike was left-handed.
“The Herald is to the right of Fox News,” Mike said. “The term liberal press doesn’t get thrown at us much.”
Garret folded the papers and put them back in his notebook. “Safe travels, McNeil. Try not to get anyone killed on the way home.”
As they walked away, Mike whispered, “If I shoot myself in the leg, can I get out of here too?”
Allison smirked. “I don’t think your boyfriend would like that. He’s already jealous. Besides, you promised to drive my car back to DC.”
They walked in silence for a few steps, Allison picking her way across the loose gravel, feeling a cold sweat spring up on her skin.
“I never apologized to you,” Mike said abruptly.
“For what?”
“I…you know…you only put your gun down because you thought I had things covered,” Mike said. “I almost got you killed.”
“But you didn’t. Here I am in all my damaged glory.”
“I got Natalie killed,” Mike said, the emotion heavy in his voice.
Allison stopped and made him look her in the eye. “Harris killed her. Not you. It was Harris.”
Mike looked at her strangely, then nodded. “You’re right. I have to keep reminding myself of that.”
She turned and kept walking to the car. Mike slid his arm into hers but his touch that had felt like such a great comfort only minut
es before, full of promise, full of potential, now felt strange and foreign. A cold shudder passed through her body and she wondered why.
51
Mike watched the sedan pull out of the warehouse lot. So far, everything had gone even better than he could have hoped. There were no holes in the story. No gaps in the investigation that couldn’t be explained. It helped having Garret there because even if something did come up, there was no way suspicion was going to fall on his good buddy Mike Carrel. That had been a masterstroke and no accident. Mike had put that in motion with a phone call to him once Allison was safely in the hospital. While Garret had told Allison that Mason asked him to come up personally, the truth was that Garret had reached out to Mason and requested the assignment.
It’d been a whirlwind couple of days, at times nearly spiraling out of control, but he’d kept calm, been patient and it’d paid off. Now he could see a path out of the wilderness. Hell, it was more than a path, it was a smoothly paved road lined with gold. Not only did he have the laptop and the hard drive, not only were the only witnesses to the video dead, but he had a burgeoning relationship with the new star in CID. He imagined a protracted romance. He chuckled as he imagined what it would be like if he ended up married to her. A serial killer married to an FBI profiler responsible for hunting killers. It was almost too good.
The only thing he didn’t like was the way she’d looked at him right before she left. There was a shift in her, so different from her reaction to him in the hospital when she’d cried in his arms like they were already lovers. He’d worried that something might be triggered when she visited the scene and he’d watched her carefully the entire time. But nothing stood out. Just the little bit at the end when she’d gotten weak and needed help to walk, and he’d felt her pull away instead of leaning into his body as he expected.
But was that really odd? The doctors hadn’t even wanted to discharge her, let alone have her wander around a crime scene on her crutches. He decided it wasn’t anything to worry about. If there was anything he knew, it was how to seduce a woman. Allison McNeil wasn’t even going to be a challenge, he was sure of it.