Seeing Red

by Sandra Brown

  From the Addisons’ back door, they walked to the car in silence, and neither of them spoke until several minutes later, when Trapper pulled into a gas station and Kerra remarked that it was closed.

  “I’m not here to get gas.” He switched on the flashlight app of one of his several cell phones, got out, and searched the underside of the car. When he got back in, Kerra asked if he’d found anything.

  “No, and I didn’t really expect to. When I mentioned the transmitter, Glenn’s puzzled reaction was genuine. I don’t believe he knew anything about it. Which means that somebody else put it there.”

  “Jenks?”

  “My money’s on him. But was he acting on his own authority or someone else’s?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, Kerra, I don’t know who or what to believe anymore. It’s tough to hear, much less accept, that Glenn has been in cahoots with Wilcox for years. No wonder he insisted I stay far removed from his investigation. He was afraid I would discover his collusion.”

  “Is he framing Leslie Duncan?”

  “I’m not sure about anything, but I’m inclined to say no to that, too. He owned up to doing much worse than planting evidence, so why not admit to that?”

  He restarted the car and steered it back onto the highway. “I can’t believe I’m even talking about Glenn Addison in criminal terms.”

  “You went there tonight knowing that at the very least he’d been disingenuous,” she said. “You started out by saying it wasn’t going to be fun.”

  “I know, but it really, really sucked. I have a lifetime of good memories with that man. Tainted now. Gone. Because Glenn made a bargain with the devil. That breaks my heart. But—”

  “But?”

  “It also pisses me off,” he said in a lower, deadlier tone. “It’s time Wilcox was stopped from destroying lives. Especially mine.”

  To punctuate his hatred of the man as well as his new resolve, he floorboarded the accelerator. “We probably won’t be coming back to the motel, so we’ll make a quick stop there and get our things.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Dallas.”

  “Now?”

  “You can nap on the way. I’ll drop you at your condo, then I’m going to pay a call on Mr. Thomas Wilcox.”

  “By the time you get there, it’ll be…” She tried to estimate the time. “One o’clock in the morning.”

  “All the better. He won’t be expecting me.”

  “His estate is a fortress, Trapper. There’s a gate. He’ll never let you in. He’ll call the police.”

  “No, he won’t. For the same reason I didn’t call them when he ambushed us in my office. I was curious to hear what he had to say. Tonight he’ll be more than curious, he’ll be itching to know if I’ve started negotiations with the feds on his behalf.”

  “You said you wouldn’t until you had his balls in one hand—”

  “Tonight I do.” He held up his fist.

  “But you don’t have his insurance policy in the other.”

  “No, but at least now I know what it is.”

  “The pledge he has everyone sign.”

  “Right. Just my knowing about it, plus the phone recording you made of our conversation, which he’s unaware of, plus Berkley Johnson’s video, which he’s unaware of, plus—”

  “Everything Glenn told us.”

  “That may come in useful later, but I won’t bring Glenn into it tonight. I won’t need to. Everything else we have adds up to a lot of leverage. But the real kicker? I’m betting that a small-town sheriff is chicken feed compared to the other power players who’ve signed Wilcox’s pledge. One or a cadre of them want him dead, and he knows they’re not squeamish about committing a murder here or there because they’ve already killed his daughter. Hammering that home will be my thumbscrews. He’ll start rethinking his terms and give me that goddamn list.”

  “It may work.”

  “I’ll make it work.”

  “There’s only one glitch in your plan.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to drop me anywhere.”

  “I wouldn’t drop you anywhere, Kerra. You’ll be safe inside your condo, especially after I threaten to emasculate the doorman if anybody except the people who live there are allowed in.”

  “I’m going with you to see Wilcox.”

  “Like hell you are. I don’t want you near him again. I didn’t want you near him in the first place, and that was before I knew that he knew that The Major carried you out of the Pegasus. You’re a danger he can’t afford.”

  “So are you!”

  “Yeah.” He jerked the car to a halt only a few feet from their motel room door. Reaching around to the small of his back, he drew his pistol, flourishing it. “But I’ve got a gun.”

  She produced a cell phone. “I’ve got the recording.”

  He snatched the phone from her hand. “Now I’ve got the phone.”

  “But not the code.”

  “It doesn’t have one.”

  “It didn’t when you gave it to me.” She shot him a cheeky grin and pushed open the car door. “It won’t take me but a sec to get my stuff.”

  “Dad?” Hank had been lying on the sofa but sat up when he heard Glenn’s tread on the stairs.

  “That fourth step has always squeaked,” Glenn complained.

  “What are you doing up? And in uniform?”

  “Just got a call from Jenks. I’ve got to go meet him out at The Pit.”

  “The Pit? All the way out there? Now?”

  “Jenks thinks he’s found a missing person. What’s left of him.”

  Hank got up, and, in stocking feet, followed his father into the kitchen, where Glenn went to the cupboard and retrieved his gun belt from the top shelf. “Surely somebody else can handle this,” Hank said.

  “Surely somebody else can. But I want to. Until tomorrow, I’m still sheriff.” Glenn buckled on the belt, adjusted it to his hips, and took his hat from the hook near the door.

  “Does Mom know you’re going?”

  “I don’t ask her permission to perform my duties.” He looked at Hank sourly. “Give me at least a five-minute head start before you go tattle.”

  “You shouldn’t go, and you certainly shouldn’t be driving. You drank a lot, you’re on medication, and in addition to what Trapper did to you—”

  Glenn turned to face him and tapped the center of Hank’s chest for emphasis. “Listen to me, Hank. Trapper didn’t do anything to me. I did it all to myself.” He bobbed his head for emphasis, then put his hat on.

  Hank watched through the screened door as his father climbed into his sheriff’s unit and backed down the drive. He didn’t turn on the light bar until he reached the road. Hank continued to watch until the flashing lights disappeared behind a rise.

  As he returned to the living room, he took his cell phone from his pants pocket and placed a call. Jenks answered on the first ring.

  Hank said, “Whatever you told him, he fell for. He’s on his way.”

  “I’m here, ready and waiting.”

  “I can send somebody to help if you feel like you need it.”

  “I’m good.”

  “I don’t want another debacle like Sunday.”

  “Neither do I,” Jenks said. “I got this.”

  Hank clicked off and lay back down on the sofa. He needed to catch some shut-eye before his mother woke up, discovered that Glenn wasn’t in bed with her, and came downstairs looking for him.

  Chapter 32

  Thomas reached for his cell phone on the bedside table before realizing that the chime was coming not from it but from the intercom panel. He threw off the covers and went over to the keypad on the wall. The blinking red light was labeled “Front Gate.” Parting the window drapes, he saw a pair of headlights shining through the iron pickets. Swearing under his breath, he returned to the keypad and pressed the button. “Jenks?”

  “Wrong. But that’s an interesting guess.”

 
Trapper.

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, for one thing I want to know why you would assume I was Deputy Sheriff Jenks, dropping by in the middle of the night, when this isn’t even his county.” He waited, then taunted, “Nothing? Not even a plausible lie? We can’t be friends if you don’t open up to me, Tom.”

  “I hope you have good news.”

  “Matter of fact, I do. I’ve got such a tight grip on your balls they’re turning blue. Oh, you meant good news for you? No, sorry.” Changing his tone to one of no nonsense, he said, “Open the gate.”

  Thomas pressed the button.

  He pulled on the cashmere sweat suit he’d been lounging in before going to bed, slid his feet into leather slippers, and left his bedroom. He’d reached the top of the staircase before he thought to go back. He tiptoed to the closed door of Greta’s room and put his ear to it. He didn’t hear a sound, and no light shone beneath the door.

  Stepping quickly but as quietly as possible, he retraced his steps, descended the stairs, disengaged the security alarm, and pulled open the front door just as Trapper was reaching for the bell.

  “Please don’t. My wife’s asleep.”

  Trapper said, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d rolled back over.”

  Kerra Bailey was with him. Both looked untidy and tired, but Thomas was discomfited by the way Kerra was staring at him, with perplexed concentration, as though trying to discern what was behind his eyes.

  “Did you know when I interviewed you last year that I was the girl in the Pegasus Hotel picture?”

  Her question caught him off guard. Unprepared to answer just yet, he opened the door wider. “Come in.” The pair stepped into the foyer. Thomas reset the alarm system, then motioned them toward his study.

  “I’m surprised you don’t have guards,” Trapper remarked. “Or do you, and they’re hiding in the bushes? Snipers on the roof? Dobermans on sentry?”

  Thomas steeled himself against Trapper’s wisecracking. He wasn’t going to let it get to him tonight. “After Tiffany’s murder, although there hadn’t been a breach of our property, we did employ security guards for a time. But rather than giving Greta peace of mind, their ‘lurking,’ as she called it, only made her more nervous.”

  “Security cameras?” Trapper asked.

  “No.”

  “Right. You wouldn’t. They could catch a corrupt cop paying you a call at an ungodly hour.”

  As they entered the study, Kerra went directly to the fireplace and looked up at the portrait above it. “Your daughter was beautiful.”

  “Inside and out.” Thomas gestured to the bar in the corner. “Can I get you something to drink?” They declined. “You don’t mind if I do?”

  “It’s your liquor,” Trapper replied.

  Thomas poured himself a neat scotch from the Baccarat decanter. When he turned back around, Trapper was twirling the madam’s pearl-handled pistol around his index finger like a gunslinger.

  “Look what I found in your desk drawer, Tom. I’ll hold on to it for the time being. Not that there’s any mistrust between us.”

  Thomas indicated an armchair to Kerra. She sat. He calmly walked over to the leather love seat and sat down. Trapper remained with his rear end propped against the edge of Thomas’s desk. He had put the pistol down but within his reach.

  Thomas took a sip of single-malt. “Why would I shoot you when I’ve admitted to needing you?”

  “About that.” Trapper crossed his arms and his ankles. “That’s why I’m here. Time to renegotiate, Tom. The power has shifted.”

  “How can that be, when you were robbed of that flash drive?”

  “I was robbed of a flash drive. The one taken out of the wall had porn on it.”

  Well, that explained why Jenks hadn’t mentioned finding the buried treasure. The deputy had been made a fool of. More galling, Thomas had fallen for Trapper’s bluff as well. “Your inflection indicates that there’s another flash drive.”

  “Sure is,” Trapper said. “And its contents are even juicier than the nasty movies.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “For starters, a video of Berkley Johnson, telling all. The time burn-in is dated two days before he was killed.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, the authorities dismissed his allegations as sour grapes.”

  “But his soul-searing video, plus this audio recording…” Trapper gave Kerra a silent signal. She took a cell phone from her handbag and went through the appropriate steps to engage it. Thomas’s voice came through the speaker.

  Thomas listened to half a minute of the recording and then quietly asked Kerra to turn it off. “You would never use that,” he said. “It would violate your integrity as a journalist. You had agreed that we were off the record.”

  “I don’t intend to publish or broadcast it,” she said coolly. “Besides, it was a unique circumstance. I was in fear of my life.”

  “Are you recording this conversation?”

  “No.”

  “I’m to believe that?”

  “Same as we’re to believe that you didn’t have Jenks put a tracking device on Kerra’s car,” Trapper said.

  Wilcox turned back to him. “I didn’t.”

  “See? Some things we just gotta take each other’s word for. Now answer Kerra’s question.”

  “About knowing if she was the girl in the picture?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Of course I knew. Within a few weeks of the bombing, I knew your name and that you’d been shuttled off to Virginia by an aunt and uncle.”

  Her lips parted.

  “How can you be surprised?” he asked. “I had to know everything about every single survivor, where they were inside the building when the bombs were detonated, who or what they might have seen.”

  “Even a child of five years old?”

  “I don’t take chances. Since your identity had been so scrupulously protected, it took some ingenuity and money, but a wily individual on my payroll, the likes of Mr. Trapper here, identified and located you.

  “I kept track. Years passed. You grew up, a normal little girl in every respect. Neither you nor your relatives ever referenced the bombing or drew the connection between it and yourself, not even as you pursued your profession when that level of notoriety would have been a boon to it. I believed I had nothing to fear from you. Until you moved to Dallas.”

  “The wily likes of me would have sat up and taken notice,” Trapper said.

  “Shortly after your arrival,” Thomas said, still speaking to Kerra, “you began requesting to do an interview with me.”

  “Panicksville.”

  Again Thomas ignored Trapper. “I agreed to the interview to test you, Kerra, to see if, while profiling me, you had somehow linked me to the Pegasus.”

  Trapper said, “You told us you did the interview to make those who killed your daughter nervous.”

  “That’s true, in part. Definitely. But I had to know if Kerra posed a threat.” Going back to her, he said, “You didn’t touch on anything remotely connected to the bombing or the complex I developed on the hotel’s former spot. Again, I relaxed.”

  “Then you learned that I was going to interview The Major,” she said.

  He took a sip of scotch. “That was one coincidence too many.”

  “You decided he and I had to be killed.”

  “Initially.” He could tell the admission stunned them, Kerra in particular. He rolled the highball glass back and forth between his palms. “However, I was advised to reconsider the fallout that a double murder would generate, the subsequent investigation, etcetera. I agreed that perhaps I had overreacted.”

  “You called off our execution.”

  “I postponed it,” he said with bald honesty. “I would wait to see what repercussions, if any, came from the interview and then make a decision. I watched the broadcast, but nothing about it unnerved me.” He paused before adding, “Obviously someone was of a differing opinion.”

  Trapper raise
d his index finger. “I’ve just figured out why the attack occurred after, not before, the interview. Unlike you, these someones didn’t know Kerra’s significance until she announced it Sunday night.”

  “When she made the public disclosure—”

  “The shit hit the fan.”

  “They acted with remarkable speed.”

  “Jenks and who else?”

  Thomas didn’t say anything to that.

  “Come on, Tom. Cough him up, and I’ll take it from there. The G-men might listen more attentively if I deliver a crooked deputy sheriff to them.”

  Thomas tipped his head toward the cell phone in Kerra’s hand and said to Trapper, “That audio recording is of little consequence. You did most of the talking. I responded with nothing incriminating or even affirming, except to say that you told a captivating story.”

  “You said you would direct me. In my summation, tell me where I went wrong.”

  Thomas didn’t say anything.

  Trapper said softly, “You’ve got to give me more, Tom, or I am not—and you can record this your ownself, spray paint it on the field of the Cotton Bowl, skywrite it over downtown, carve it into your skin, whatever—I am not going to the feds and sticking my neck out for you.

  “If you continue to hold out, I’ve a good mind to call your buddy Jenks and tell him you’ve ratted him out. That’ll guarantee that I won’t have to waste another minute of my life obsessing over you because you will be O. V. E. R. Talk to me, now, or all bets are off.”

  Thomas assessed his situation and, although it rankled, acknowledged that Trapper did hold the advantage. Thomas had only one chance to see justice done for Tiffany. The tradeoff was admitting to Trapper his own wrongdoing.

  He swirled the liquid in his glass as he carefully chose his words. “Where you went wrong was overthinking it. You envisioned a conclave of like-minded men, a clan. You imagined it being founded on a doctrine, because you couldn’t conceive of it of being so incredibly simple. There is no higher cause. Never was. No philosophy or creed or anything like what you surmised. Nothing idealistic or anarchist or radically inspired.”

  “Then how did you get your converts?”