Deck the Hounds: An Andy Carpenter Mystery

by David Rosenfelt

  Tasker and his team are across the way at the prosecution table. Our eyes meet and he gives me a slight nod, which I return. It’s either a sign of mutual respect, or just a couple of guys nodding.

  Hatchet comes in, and we all rise on command. He tells us to be seated. He looks pissed off; I think it’s because in a few moments one lawyer will be declared the winner, and he hates when a lawyer, any lawyer, is happy.

  He calls the jury in and asks if they have reached a verdict. They say that they have, and my stress level elevates to the point where there is a significant chance my head will explode.

  I think I can ultimately prove Carrigan’s innocence, but if Carrigan is convicted, he is going to spend a long time in jail, no matter what. We need the jury to set him free.

  Today.

  The foreman gives the verdict sheet to the clerk, who gives it to Hatchet to look at. Hatchet hands it back to the clerk to read aloud, and Carrigan, Hike, and I stand.

  The clerk reads it without emotion, an amazing trick, since there is nothing more emotional than the moment a verdict is read. She drones on about the various counts, and New Jersey, and statutes.

  But finally she gets to the key words:

  “Not guilty.”

  Carrigan turns to me and takes my hand. “I know I said it didn’t matter,” he says, “but, turns out, it matters.”

  I signal to Laurie, who is in the front row and has given me a thumbs-up about the verdict. Then she does even better than that, as she comes over and gives both me and Carrigan a hug. I think she’s crying, not big sobs, just teary stuff.

  I tell Carrigan that he’ll need to do some paperwork, but that then Laurie will take over.

  I start walking over toward Tasker and it turns out that he is coming toward me. We meet halfway and shake hands. He graciously compliments me on a job well done. I praise the job he did as well, but refrain from thanking him for his service.

  Then I say, “Can we go in the anteroom for a couple of minutes? We need to talk.”

  “What about?” he asks.

  “You won’t believe it.”

  Tasker’s office is in Newark, which is the county seat in Essex.

  I’m sitting in that office; it’s just he and I. Other people are going to have to be involved, but this is not yet the time.

  It’s a little awkward, since we’ve been adversaries throughout the entire case. But he’s a smart guy and seems to be one of those public servants who really want to get to the truth and see justice done. Hopefully we’re about to.

  His intercom buzzes and he picks it up, listens, and then puts it down. “She’s here,” he says.

  Moments later the door opens, and one of his assistants shows in Karen McMaster. She sees Tasker first and then reacts in surprise when she realizes that I am here as well. “Why is he here?” she asks, referring to me with obvious disdain.

  “Mr. Carpenter is here at my request,” Tasker says. “He’s a part of this, and his involvement right now is to everyone’s benefit, including yours.”

  “He publicly accused me of murdering my husband,” she says. Then, “Maybe I should have my own lawyer with me.”

  “That is your right, but I think after hearing what we have to say, you won’t consider it necessary. Please sit down.”

  She does so, albeit a bit warily. Tasker turns to me and says, “Andy?” It’s the first time he’s called me that; I think we’re becoming buddies.

  “We have reason to believe that Craig Kimble is responsible for your husband’s death.”

  “Oh, come on…” she says.

  “It’s true. He set up Don Carrigan to take the fall. But he had a plan B in case that didn’t work out. That plan B was you.”

  “What does that mean?” she asks.

  “As I am sure you know, he has an apartment in your building, purchased in the name of one of his companies. You and he were in a romantic relationship—”

  She interrupts. “That’s not true.” She’s still clinging to that lie.

  I nod. “Okay, you were really good friends. But he was in your apartment a lot; I suspect he even had a key. He received calls from Ernie Vinson and Yuri Ganady in your apartment on your phone; if there was ever any scrutiny, he wanted it to appear that the calls went to you.”

  She’s not interrupting anymore.

  “And as you testified, he did tell you that he had an early dinner with Steven that night, and got you worried enough to call your neighbor. But the reason that there was no phone call proving your claim is that he was in your apartment when he told you. You just didn’t want to admit it on the stand.”

  Tasker hands her a photograph from the building security camera, showing Ganady going into her apartment building the day that Marcus followed him. “He even had Ganady come to the apartment, knowing he’d be seen by the security camera,” I say. “If Carrigan was convicted, then it wouldn’t matter. If he wasn’t, then you were the backup.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just guessing now,” I say. “He might have been doing it to get Steven out of the way, because you were such … good friends. Or, believe it or not, he might have been doing it to test out a system.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Tasker interjects, “We can’t talk about that right now, but it doesn’t involve you.”

  “Is Kimble a large investor, even a silent partner, in your husband’s company?” The company is privately owned, so there is no way to tell ownership.

  She looks surprised at the question and then nods. “Yes.”

  “So he may have some legal arrangement where if you went to jail he could buy your share. It’s an added bonus for him; he had all the angles covered.”

  “That son of a bitch,” she says, her voice lower in volume but higher in intensity.

  The way she says that reassures me. Until now I thought there was a chance that she conspired with Kimble on all of this; now I no longer think so.

  “He’s even worse than you think,” Tasker says. “But what we know and what we can prove are two different things.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “That’s why you’re here,” I say.

  “I need to see you; it’s urgent,” Karen McMaster says into the phone.

  She’s speaking to Craig Kimble, who is in his own apartment, just three floors below her. “Please come up here, Craig.” She hangs up the phone and says to me, “He’ll be right up.”

  Three minutes later the door opens; Kimble obviously has a key. “What is…” he starts to say, and then sees me. “Well, this is a surprise.”

  “Mr. Carpenter has been telling me a story,” she says. “I want you to hear it and tell him he’s crazy.”

  I stand and say, “Actually, I don’t need to be here for this. Karen can fill you in.”

  “No, I think you do need to be here,” Kimble says. “I have a strong feeling you need to be here. So sit down.”

  He talks in a tone that says that he is in charge and not to be challenged. So I do as he says and I sit down. Once I do, he adds, “Go ahead, Karen.”

  “Mr. Carpenter says that you arranged for Steven to be killed and that you framed Mr. Carrigan. He also says that you were planning to frame me if that became necessary.”

  “That’s crazy. Karen, you can’t believe that.”

  “He says he has proof.”

  I nod. “I know about James Lasky, and Ernie Vinson, and Yuri Ganady … and Judge Eric Yount.”

  The last name gets his attention, and he pauses before he responds. When he finally does, that response is as much physical as verbal. He takes out a gun and holds it on us. It’s a small gun, but I suspect it can do a lot of damage. “That changes the calculation.”

  “Craig, what are you doing?” Karen says, fear evident in her voice.

  “Don’t do this,” I say. “I’m going to leave now.”

  He points the gun at me. “No, you’re not.”

  “You can’t keep me here against my will,�
� I say. “This is kidnapping.”

  He smiles. “It’s worse than that. I sense a murder suicide is coming. You came here to confront Karen and she panicked and shot you, then killed herself. All very tragic.”

  He keeps the gun trained on us and walks toward the door to the bedroom. “In here,” he says. “It’ll add a sordid touch to it.”

  Just then there is a knock on the door, and he turns slightly to look toward it. The next thing he does is drop the gun and scream, probably because Marcus has chopped down on his arm. Based on the cracking sound his arm made, I suspect it will be in a cast until next Christmas.

  Marcus tosses Kimble into the wall with less difficulty than I would throw a tennis ball. When Kimble crashes to the floor, Marcus leans on him with one knee on his back.

  Karen goes to open the door, and when she does, a bunch of New York cops enter, guns drawn. They take custody of Kimble as Marcus lets him up. Tasker comes in behind them, just as I would have. We lawyers tend to lead from behind.

  Tasker comes over to me, and referring to Marcus, says, “I can see why you insisted on him.”

  I nod. “We are the two toughest guys you will ever want to meet.”

  The cops take Kimble away; he is still yelling in pain from his arm.

  I go over to Karen McMaster and say, “I’m sorry for what I put you through during the trial. I was wrong, and I will do my best to fix it.”

  She nods. “Thank you. You’ve already fixed a lot of it. Seeing Steven’s real killer caught helps a lot.”

  For the first time, our victory party is not at Charlie’s.

  It’s at the house that Don Carrigan is renting, with an option to buy. It’s got a lot of open space, a lot of glass, and a lot of windows to open.

  I am footing the bill for this, but I will get paid back once we successfully win our civil case against Craig Kimble. It’s a slam dunk; Carrigan will be a rich man. He will then pay me back, including my fee for handling the case. It’s a win-win.

  The other guests at the party, not surprisingly, are Laurie, Hike, Edna, and Sam. Laurie tells me that Willie and Sondra will be a little late, but that they are on their way. I’ve also invited Pete and Vince, since they would have been at Charlie’s if we had it there. They will also happily consume free food and beer wherever it’s served.

  I’ve brought Tara and Sebastian to reconnect with their old friend Zoey. Zoey seems quite at home here; she has her own bed and a treasure trove of chew toys. She shows Tara and Sebastian around as if she is hoping they might make an offer on the house.

  The media has obviously covered Kimble’s arrest extensively, but they haven’t had nearly all the facts. Vince wants to do a follow-up piece for his newspaper, so he comes armed with a bunch of questions for me. In two days I am going to do a TV interview exonerating Karen McMaster, and Vince wants to get his story out before then.

  I explain to him that what the McMaster case and sniper shooting case had in common is that Lasky identified for Kimble two homeless people who would make perfect people to frame. Kimble would then take advantage of their being off the grid, to use Tasker’s phrase. They were as close to being invisible as is possible in this day and age.

  But Vinson was supposed to have captured Carrigan the first time, when he took the hat. He would then have killed him, preventing him from ever being found and brought to trial. I assume he told Ganady and Kimble that he had killed Carrigan, assuming they would never find out otherwise.

  When Lasky told Vinson that Carrigan was back, he tried to finish the job, but Carrigan again fought him off, and Zoey bit him. Once Carrigan’s name was in the paper, Ganady found out that Vinson had lied, and killed him.

  Simmons’s case was a bit different. They held him prisoner while they killed one person after another, making it look like Simmons was getting revenge on those who wronged him.

  They made the shooting of Judge Alexander appear as if Eric Yount had been the target, but the shooter had missed. To quote Tasker again, “We’re human … we missed once.” It was all to get Eric assigned to the Baxter Optics case; Kimble owned a majority stake in that company, and the verdict meant three hundred million dollars to him.

  Once that was done, they then killed Simmons and made it look like a suicide.

  Lasky has been arrested and is cooperating; it turns out that he also planted the ring.

  “When did you know it was Kimble?” Vince asks.

  “Oh, yes, Sherlock, please tell us.” Pete has the gall to sneer at me while eating my food and drinking my beer.

  “Basically, Vince, what I try to do is approach it the way Pete would, and then go the opposite way. He would have arrested Karen McMaster, so I knew she couldn’t be guilty.”

  “You want me to quote you on that?” Vince asks.

  “If you do, they’ll be identifying both your bodies tomorrow morning,” Pete says.

  “Okay, the truth is, Vince, that there was no ‘aha’ moment. I knew that the sniper shootings and our case were connected, but I couldn’t for the life of me see how Karen McMaster would have benefitted from those other killings. If she was guilty of killing her husband, the motives would have been money or sex or love, or any combination of the three. That didn’t fit with the sniper case.”

  “What about Kimble?”

  “I went toward him one step at a time. When I had told him he was going to testify in our case, he mentioned he was about to testify in a more important one. He had the money to pull all of this off, and he had the international business connections to possibly get access to these mercenary types.

  “So I slowly built the case against him in my mind. First Sam found out that in fact he lived in Karen’s building, registered in the name of the same company that was before Judge Yount in a very important patent case. And I knew that Kimble had dinner with Steven McMaster the night of his murder. Karen said that he told her they had an early dinner, and since he hadn’t called, he must have been in her apartment when he told her. It was an easy jump to his having been in the apartment when Vinson and Ganady called as well.

  “But it wasn’t until Nancy Yount confirmed it all that I was positive.”

  “You may not be as dumb as you look,” Vince says, which is pretty much the nicest thing he has ever said to me, or anybody.

  The party starts to thin out, and Laurie and I are having a glass of wine on the couch when Carrigan comes over to us. He tells us that he has arranged to see a therapist to help him deal with his PTSD. “It’s going to be a slow process,” he says, “but I’ll get there.”

  “I know you will,” Laurie says.

  “You’ve given me my freedom and my life back,” he says to us. “Even my dog. I can never thank you enough.”

  “Make that ‘dogs,’” Laurie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Laurie signals with her hand, and Willie and Sondra come into the room holding the cutest puppy that has existed on the planet, except, of course, for Tara.

  “She was the runt of the litter,” Sondra says. “We thought you might want her.”

  Carrigan doesn’t say anything for a few moments; I think he is holding back tears. I know I am. Laurie, for her part, is not interested in holding them back, she is openly crying.

  Finally, Carrigan says, “You have no idea how much I want her.”

  “And if you want to hang out at the foundation once in a while, we can use the help.”

  Carrigan smiles. “I’ll be there every day.”

  It’s left to Laurie to sum it up. “Merry Christmas.”

  Carrigan smiles again. “Still?”

  I nod. “It’s getting hard to tell when one Christmas ends and another begins.”

  ALSO BY DAVID ROSENFELT

  ANDY CARPENTER NOVELS

  Rescued

  Collared

  The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

  Outfoxed

  Who Let the Dog Out?

  Hounded

  Unleashed

  Leader of
the Pack

  One Dog Night

  Dog Tags

  New Tricks

  Play Dead

  Dead Center

  Sudden Death

  Bury the Lead

  First Degree

  Open and Shut

  THRILLERS

  Fade to Black

  Blackout

  Without Warning

  Airtight

  Heart of a Killer

  On Borrowed Time

  Down to the Wire

  Don’t Tell a Soul

  NONFICTION

  Lessons from Tara: Life Advice from the World’s Most Brilliant Dog

  Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

  About the Author

  DAVID ROSENFELT is the Edgar-nominated and Shamus Award–winning author of nine stand-alones and seventeen previous Andy Carpenter novels, most recently Rescued. He and his wife live in Maine with twenty-five of the four thousand dogs they have rescued.

  Visit him at www.davidrosenfelt.com, or sign up email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Also by David Rosenfelt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DECK THE HOUNDS. Copyright © 2018 by Tara Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.