The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line

by Richard Yancey

  “Felicia?” I said softly. “Felicia.”

  Then I sat for a while and didn’t say anything.

  7:05 p.m.

  Her eyes opened. I stood up. She lifted her arm a few inches from the mattress, gestured toward her throat.

  “Not supposed to talk,” she whispered, her voice barely rising above the level of a croak. She cut her eyes toward the bedside table and flicked a finger impatiently in that direction. Lying there were a small dry-erase board and a marker. I handed them to her.

  “Where’s Bob?” she wrote.

  “At home with Tommy. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “??”

  “I called your house. He answered; I hung up.”

  She pointed at me, then raised her hand over her head and jerked on an imaginary noose. Her tongue came out of her mouth.

  I nodded. “Big-time.”

  She picked up the board. “Hypo??”

  “He’s been following me since the day my ill-advised ploy with his mom blew up. He’s been lying low because basically these Kein Mitleid dudes are even crazier than he is, the reason he also has to know who I am and whom I’m working for. He’s pretty sure it’s Kein, though. Maybe even thinks he can send them a message through me. Follows me around. Tails me down to the meeting with Dayton. Now he’s convinced. He breaks into my apartment. Maybe he breaks in with the idea of killing me. Maybe he’s going to hide somewhere, jump me when I come back, but Archie’s barking and he won’t stop. Quinton grabs one of my knives, opens the crate.… Then for some reason, he leaves. Maybe he gets bored, I don’t know, or spooked, thinking a neighbor’s heard the commotion.

  “He decides to try again, because the risk is just unacceptable. The botch on Friday has now doubled his risk of going back to Brushy Mountain, and he knows he isn’t going to last five minutes there. He has to kill me now. So he breaks into my office, hides out in the bathroom, and waits for Monday morning. Only you show up Sunday night. He doesn’t know who you are or why you’re there, but it puts him on the horns of a dilemma. Does he stay put, pray you aren’t staying long or that you have a strong bladder? Does he chance you seeing him, getting away somehow, going to the cops? Or is it better just to kill you? Which risk is more acceptable?”

  “# 2,” she wrote.

  “And he’s lucky,” I said. “He brought my knife to do the job. He may have dropped it on purpose. He doesn’t know who you are or why you’re there, but at the very least my knife is going to muddy the waters.”

  “Very muddy.”

  She was staring up into my face. I chewed on my bottom lip for a second.

  “Before he beat me up, Bob said they expected a full recovery.”

  “??”

  “He didn’t tell you about beating me up?”

  The marker flew across the board. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why he didn’t tell you. You probably should ask him.”

  She sighed loudly, wiped the board clean with the heel of her hand, and then wrote in big letters “KPD.”

  “They’ve been here?”

  She nodded.

  “They showed you my note.”

  Nodded.

  “I can explain that.”

  She waited.

  “Do I need to explain that?”

  Nodded.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you do it, Felicia? Why did you go into the office on a Sunday night?”

  She scribbled on the board, shoved it toward me. “Don’t change the subject!!!”

  “You’ve got every right to be angry. I was on the brink that day, teetering on the edge of the abyss. You know: Archie. Archie was what I had. The only thing I had. Christ, the best I could do that night for a date was a middle-aged man. You have Bob; I had Archie and that’s all I had.”

  I took a deep breath, let it out. She was staring at me. I went on. “And then all I had was gone, and on the surface, writing what I wrote is a pretty bizarre response to losing him, but if you look at it from another angle, the angle of me staring into the absolute darkness, it does make a little sense. It was a declaration. A rage against the dying of the light. I’m going to run it by Dr. Fredericks, whom I’ve been seeing every Wednesday like clockwork. I never told you because I guess I was a little ashamed and I was afraid you might think I was weak, and that’s the last thing I would ever want you to think about me—that I was weak.”

  “You are weak,” she wrote.

  “Plus, we’ve had the agreement since the beginning that we keep our personal lives personal. I mean, I was never going to give it to you. I wrote it for me. To clarify some things, or maybe it was just to confess—not to you, but to me, to the universe. Does that make any sense?”

  She wrote in big block letters “FUCKUP.”

  “Well, okay. But I’m telling you the truth. I never intended to give it to you. I’d never put you in that position. You love someone else; I know that.”

  “Cops know, too.”

  “Right. Which has created some difficulties. It’s a bird in the hand kind of thing. Look, Felicia, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am—for this, for that stupid, high school-ish love note, for not listening to you when you said to back off. If I had listened to you, Archie would be alive and you wouldn’t be here. I don’t know what it is in me that zigs when a zag is called for. Maybe to prove to myself that I’m special.”

  “You are special.”

  “You not coming back to work for me, are you?”

  “In prison??”

  “If I beat the rap.”

  She thought a minute about her answer.

  “Already have,” she wrote.

  I didn’t get it. “Already have what?”

  “Beat it.”

  She started to write more, then tossed the board and marker aside in frustration and crooked her finger at me. I bent over, leaning on the rail, and brought my ear to within an inch of her mouth. I smelled peaches.

  “Saw him,” she whispered.

  “ ‘Saw him’?” I echoed. I pulled away to look into her eyes, which were rimmed charcoal black. “Saw who?”

  “Quinton, you moron!” That had hurt. Wincing from the pain, she grabbed my shirt, pulled me down again. “Right before he grabbed me.”

  “You ID’d Quinton? But you told the cops he jumped you from behind.”

  “I was confused. Loss of blood. The anesthesia.”

  “So he didn’t jump you from behind?”

  She popped me in the back of the head.

  “Told you, Ruzak,” she whispered in my ear. “I was confused.”

  I stood up. She was smiling.

  “So you didn’t see him … but you saw him,” I said slowly.

  She gave me a thumbs-up. “Ruzak.” She turned the thumb down. “Quinton.”

  8:17 p.m.

  She fell back to sleep. She was exhausted. I put the board and marker back on the table and returned to the lounger. Night had fully fallen, and the city lights sparkled in the dark water below and painted the undersides of the low, scudding clouds a dusky yellow. Brake lights twinkled on the bridge. The Sunsphere glowed.

  My plan had been to be far away from Baptist Hospital well before Bob returned, but that had changed. Everything had.

  I bowed my head, trying to think. My spinning thoughts banged into one another like bumper cars, and then Bob walked in, and that’s how he found us, his lover sleeping a few feet away, and me with shoulders hunched and eyes closed because I didn’t want to look at it dead on, what she had done to protect me and the corner into which it had painted me. I turned from it, and every time I turned, there it was, right in front of me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  I raised my head. “I’m leaving, Bob. I just wanted to…” I searched for the answer. What was it? What did I want to do? Was it the same as what I had to do? Did I have a choice anymore, or had things reached the point where what I wished for was irrelevant in the roarin
g rush of events? What was I doing there?

  “Make sure she was okay,” I said finally. I stood up. “Don’t leave her alone.”

  “I can’t believe you had the balls to come in here. You’ve got a real problem, Ruzak.”

  “I know,” I said. “And there’s gotta be some right way to fix it. That’s my hope. My fear is the opposite.”

  WEDNESDAY

  9:17 a.m.

  “Wow,” Meredith Black said, looking at me with those smoky gray eyes. “That’s really weird.”

  “What?” I asked. “That she’d lie to protect me?”

  “That she’d sacrifice her safety for yours.”

  “She’s not looking at it as a sacrifice. The problem is, she doesn’t think like Quinton Stiles thinks.”

  “And you do?”

  “Well, I could be wrong, but just because you’re a homicidal maniac, that doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”

  “The other weird thing is, here you are, a suspect in this case, informing law enforcement that the one witness who gets you off the hook is lying.”

  “It’s not my hook I’m worried about.”

  “What if I told you she had absolutely nothing to worry about?”

  “I would ask how the hell you could say that with any confidence, since no one seems to know where Quinton Stiles is.”

  She nodded. She didn’t say anything. It hit me.

  “You found him.”

  She nodded again.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said. She hit a button on her phone and told the person who picked up to show him in.

  “Show who in?” I asked. I swiveled in my chair, expecting Quinton Stiles to come strolling through the door. My heart was pounding; blood roared in my ears. It was a dizzying, existential moment. He’d lived so long in the domain of my imagination, the thought of seeing him in the flesh seemed a little unreal.

  But it wasn’t Quinton who came through Meredith Black’s door. It was Eades and a guy I had never seen before. Dark hair, clean-shaven, well dressed in a dark designer suit.

  “Teddy, this is Special Agent Marcum of the FBI,” Meredith said.

  We shook hands. His grip was viselike. He sat down beside me. Eades loitered by the door, stoically looking at the view of the basketball museum over Meredith’s shoulder.

  “First off,” Marcum began. “I’d like to say how sorry we are for what happened to your dog, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “How do you know what happened to my dog?” I was looking at Meredith. She was looking at Marcum.

  “It happens sometimes,” he went on. “You can’t baby-sit ’em twenty-four/seven.”

  “What happens?” I asked. “Can’t baby-sit who?”

  “Teddy,” Meredith said, “for the past twelve months, Quinton Stiles has been a confidential informant for the Justice Department.”

  I looked over at Marcum. He was studying his manicure.

  “Agent Marcum is his handler,” Meredith added.

  Marcum sighed. “And he’s a handful.”

  It was starting to sink in. “Kein Mitleid,” I said.

  Marcum shook his head. “White Aryan Nation.”

  “No Kein?” I asked.

  “WAN,” he said, shaking his head again.

  “Stiles turned to them for protection after his release,” Meredith told me.

  “Then he turned to us,” Marcum said.

  “To protect him against his protectors?”

  Marcum shrugged. “We approached him.”

  “ ‘Work with us or we give you up to Rache’s boys’?”

  Marcum was picking at his thumbnail; something was bugging him about it.

  “He’s been at WAN headquarters down in Polk County ever since his release,” Meredith said. “Working his way up through the ranks, ingratiating himself with upper management.”

  “Dayton denied all that,” I said.

  “Dayton’s not his name,” Marcum said.

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “And now he’s close. We’re close,” Marcum said. He was looking at Meredith with a kind of pained expression, like he was feeling a bit put out about having to explain it to the big dumb PI. “We get this right, and the whole house of cards comes down. We’re talking multiple indictments, Mr. Ruzak. The entire command structure of one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist organizations in the country.”

  I looked at Meredith. “You knew about this?”

  “Not until we leaned on the right person,” she said.

  I thought about it. Not his mom. It just didn’t feel right. “Isabella?” I asked. Of course Isabella. No wonder she hadn’t been concerned about Quinton’s release. Who needed some dumbass PI when the feds were looking after things? She knew he had been down at the WAN compound the entire time.

  “Look, Mr. Ruzak,” Marcum said crisply. He glanced at his watch. “Quinton Stiles is an indispensable asset to our investigation. He’s the linchpin holding the whole thing together. We lose that linchpin now, and a year of hard work goes down the drain. More than a year. We’ve been trying to get these nut jobs since ’94. We are not jeopardizing our investment on account of a dead dog.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to do that,” Meredith said. “We’re not. And I don’t think Teddy is, either.”

  “He jumped my secretary,” I said. “Cut her throat open. Left her for dead.”

  “We don’t know that,” Marcum said. “You don’t know that.”

  “Well, somebody did. You want me to believe it wasn’t connected to what happened to Archie?”

  “Who’s Archie?”

  “The dead dog,” Meredith said.

  “Oh. Right,” Marcum said. “Well, he did kill your dog, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “I know that; I know he killed my dog. How do you know?”

  “He told us. He was given the go-ahead to take you out.”

  “Go-ahead? Whose go-ahead?”

  “Dayton wanted you out of the picture. Picked Quinton for the job. We think it was a final test of his loyalty to the group. So we didn’t feel we had a choice but to let him make a play at it at least. But I assure you we didn’t send him in with any orders to knife your pooch. That was all Quinton. He told Dayton the dog came at him and he was afraid to hang around afterward, afraid one of your neighbors had called the cops. Dayton bought it.”

  “Why did Dayton want me out of the picture?”

  “You spooked him. Understand these types are paranoid as all hell. He figures you’re either working for us or for Kein Mitleid. Either way, an unacceptable risk. So he gives the job to Quinton, to test him, like I said.”

  “And Felicia?”

  “He swears he wasn’t there.”

  “But my knife was.”

  “He’s fingering Benton.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “I probably would, too, if I were in his shoes. But he’s sticking to his story, even after we confronted him about your girlfriend’s ID.”

  “You told him that?” I couldn’t believe it. “Why did you tell him about that?” I started to shake. Just as I thought a little light was eking through, darkness slammed back down.

  “Why do you think?” For the first time, Marcum allowed himself the smallest of smiles.

  I thought. “No option to back out. He finishes what he started or he goes back to Brushy Mountain for attempted murder. And he won’t last five minutes in Brushy Mountain.”

  Marcum seemed pleased I got it. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Thanks to your girlfriend, we now own Quinton Stiles.”

  “Stop calling her my girlfriend,” I said, my volume kicking up a notch.

  “Okay, Teddy,” Meredith said. “Let’s think this through.”

  “She’s lying,” I said to Marcum.

  “Who?”

  “My girlfriend. I mean, my Felicia. I mean, Felicia, my … Ah, crap. Look, Marcum, she didn’t really see him. She just said that to protect me.”

  “It’s okay, Teddy,” Meredith said. “We know who’s
responsible now.”

  I slapped my hand on the arm of the chair. “That’s not the point, Meredith!” I turned to Marcum. “Quinton has to understand that she lied. She didn’t see who jumped her. You have to tell him that. And if he’s already told Dayton she fingered him, he has to tell him, too. It’s the only way to avoid—”

  Marcum was shaking his head. Meredith was scratching her chin as she studied something fascinating on the ceiling tiles.

  “Can’t,” he said.

  “Can’t? What part?”

  “Can’t tell Dayton she made it up. How would Quinton know that?”

  “If Dayton thinks she saw Quinton, he’s going to wonder why Quinton doesn’t do something about it.”

  “That may be true, but the milk’s kind of already been spilt here, Ted. Look, the good news is we’re in the fourth quarter of this thing. Another month, maybe two, and we roll out the indictments. WAN goes down and Stiles goes away. We’ve already got the new identity set up, picked out a place for him in Phoenix.”

  “And you told him if he touches one hair on her head, the deal is off.”

  “Of course. Yours, too.”

  “But you can’t tell Dayton that.”

  “That’d be kind of awkward, don’t you think?”

  “What makes you think Quinton won’t try something anyway?”

  “Because he’s a lot of things, but one thing he isn’t is stupid.”

  “What if he doesn’t trust you? What if he thinks you’ll get your indictments and then bust him?”

  Marcum seemed genuinely taken aback at the suggestion.

  “Why wouldn’t he trust us?” he asked.

  “Because people like him don’t trust anybody.”

  “It isn’t about trust, Teddy,” Meredith said. “It’s about risk. The task force are the only people who have his back right now. He violates the agreement and he goes down for Arch and maybe Felicia, too. He won’t risk that.”

  “You could look at it from another angle,” I said. Why was I the only person in the room who got this? It was maddening. Even the big bad FBI handler didn’t get it. I had never even met Quinton Stiles, and I got it. “If he’s afraid of anybody, it isn’t the FBI; it’s Dayton. If Dayton knows she fingered him, what’s his reason for not going after her?”