by Joseph Flynn
Pretty damn slick way for two girls from Mercy Ridge to get rid of a man who’d lost their favor. Too bad for them they didn’t think things through just a step or two further. They might have gotten away with it all.
No, not really. Not if the spirit of Daniel Red Hawk had anything to say about it.
John walked through town, asking himself if he was overlooking anything. As if in reply, his ring-tone sounded. Darton Blake was calling from Austin with good news.
“Coy Wilson is on her way up to Canada. Pulled some strings to get her the quickest connections.”
John said, “That’s great. Thanks.”
“It gets even better.”
“How’s that?”
“There was something else in that lock box,” Darton said. “A confession.”
When John heard the details, he knew why Daniel Red Hawk’s cloud had been smiling.
Chapter 41
Calgary, Alberta — July 18, the present
John and Sergeant Bramley met Coy Wilson at Calgary International Airport. The musician had made the trip with her guitar. She’d also brought a small carryon bag and an air of anxiety. She shook hands with John, and then Bramley stepped forward.
“I’ve seen you perform,” she said, shaking Coy’s hand. “You’ve played the Stampede at the Saddledome, right?”
“I have,” Coy said, her jitters easing a bit.
Bramley turned to John. “This woman is proof positive that playing lead guitar isn’t just for guys. She knocks me out.”
John said, “I’ll hit iTunes the first chance I get.”
Coy eyed him. “She’s not BS-ing me. I don’t know about you.”
John said, “Rock, pop, country, gospel: I like it all.”
“I got him to consider country, and he’s not so big on metal.”
Coy smiled and looked at the two of them. “You’re not doing good cop, bad cop, are you?”
John and Bramley laughed. It was plain Ms. Wilson had never seen the real thing.
“She thinks we don’t appreciate culture,” Bramley told John.
They found a booth at the Kelsey’s restaurant in the airport and ordered soft drinks. Bramley, in uniform, took the outside seat next to John to keep their space clear of idlers. Coy sat opposite them. John leaned forward.
With a straight face, he said, “You’ll notice we made sure there’s no one blocking your exit in case you feel the urge to run.”
“Men,” Bramley said, shaking her head. “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Ms. Wilson. I’ll remind Special Agent Tall Wolf to watch his manners as necessary.”
They were teasing her now, Coy knew, but it was helping.
She started to relax. Smiled at them.
“Detective Blake told me it was important for me to come.”
John said, “He’s a good guy. May I see the letter you found in your safe deposit box?”
Coy took a black leather folio out of her bag. She flipped it open, revealing a pad of lined paper. On the top page, handwritten in blue ink, were two four-line blocks of writing. Trained observers, both John and Bramley noticed. Coy saw them looking.
“A song I started to write on the flight up here,” she told them.
“You feeling good about what you have so far?” Bramley asked.
Coy grinned. “Now, you sound like a producer, but yeah, I am.”
“Hope I get to hear it someday.”
Coy knew she was being flattered, but the kind words were having the desired effect.
The two cops were making her feel safe instead of threatened.
“Here’s what you want,” she told John. She took out a sheet of unlined paper from the back of the notepad and handed it to him.
He read the message twice, handed it to Bramley.
“That should do it, right?” Coy asked. “A signed confession is as good as it gets, isn’t it?”
The second question drew Bramley’s attention as she finished reading.
“Detective Blake kept the original?” John asked.
Coy nodded.
“He made the copy for you to give to me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice the top edge of the photocopy, Sergeant Bramley?”
“I did,” she said.
“What about it?” Coy asked.
Bramley handed the piece of paper to her and said, “The page that was copied has perforations across the top.”
Coy bobbed her head. “I saw that, but so what?”
“It suggests the confession you found in that lock box was torn off a pad of paper, and maybe the pad belonged to Ms. White. A defense attorney might say Jackson stole it from his mother.”
“I didn’t steal it,” Coy said. “My name was on that lock box account, and I gave it to the police. So they came by it honestly, too.”
“That might be enough for a reasonable judge,” John said. “But if you get one of those legal sticklers, he might agree with the argument that if the confession was stolen in the first place, it doesn’t matter if anyone came by it honestly after that.”
“Well, hell, what do we do now?” Coy asked.
John said in a calm tone, “You could go home right now and have a clear conscience.”
“But you’ve got something else in mind. Detective Blake told me that, but he wouldn’t say what it was.”
“I do have something in mind,” John said. “Do you want to hear what it is?”
Coy thought about it for a minute.
“Will your plan help me feel better about what happened to Jackson?”
“I’ll tell you and you can decide.”
Coy heard John out and nodded.
“I can do that,” she said. “I want to do it.”
John smiled. Now, all they had to do was wait for Guy and Louie to arrive.
While they waited for the Forger brothers, Sergeant Bramley got Superintendent Kent’s mobile phone number for John. He left Bramley and Coy Wilson chatting about music in the restaurant, found a seat in a quiet stretch of the concourse and called Kent.
“This might sound a bit odd, Superintendent,” John said, “but please bear with me. How do you feel about sports agents?”
“Greedy bastards, the lot of them,” Kent said, playing along. “They turn athletes into mercenaries and sports fans into fools.”
“Are you familiar with the name Harvey Kingsbury?”
“He’s the worst of the worst, at least as far as professional hockey is concerned.”
John smiled. He was counting on Kent being typically Canadian in his passion for the sport.
“How would you like to have a chance to rattle his cage?”
Kent’s evil chuckle would have done credit to Darth Vader.
“I started liking you, Special Agent Tall Wolf, when you bought drinks for the sergeant and the constables, not just SAC Melvin and me. If, within the context of our case, you can give me reason to have a go at Harvey Kingsbury, I’d be obliged to buy you a drink.”
“I’m a cheap date, Superintendent. Mostly, I drink water. But here’s what I have in mind.”
Kent listened without interruption and then said, “That’s not only a legitimate idea, it might be the proverbial final nail in the coffin.”
“We can hope,” John said.
“I’ll get right on it,” Kent told him.
Chapter 42
Banff, Alberta — July 18, the present
Annie Forger and Lily White Bird sat looking out the living room windows of the single family home they rented on Muskrat Street. The house was a modern take on a two-story log cabin. There were three bedrooms, two baths, extensive landscaping and heart-stopping mountain views.
The cash flow from Go Hollywood met their living expenses in town and provided a small surplus. The arrangement allowed each sister to remain well heeled and to carefully tend her investments and watch her money grow. It was an immensely gratifying situation for two girls who had grown up poor at Mercy Ridge.
; The simple fact that they were allowed to live in Banff showed how far they’d come. You couldn’t just move to town at whim, write a fat check and buy a house. You had to demonstrate “a need to reside” in Banff to be allowed to live there. Residential land was available only for community use. People who simply wanted to buy a recreational or second home were out of luck.
Banff was a small jewel and its planning commission meant to keep it that way.
Snubbing the rich might have seemed an odd strategy for a resort destination, but the monied classes preferred to come and go anyway. When they appeared, they were treated lavishly and urged to return. They just couldn’t put down roots.
Annie and Lily, on the other hand, felt the natural beauty was so compelling they wanted to call Banff home. They joked with each other that the town was what a reservation in heaven must look like, and the fact that they’d been admitted was no mean feat.
They had met one of the requirements for showing a need to reside: They operated a business in town, and Go Hollywood employed three people other than themselves. Annie had been the first to visit Banff on a ski trip with her late husband, Vern. After his death, she’d brought Lily to see it. If anything, Lily loved the town even more than Annie. She’d been the one who had investigated what it would take to live there. She was the one who first expressed to the local officials an interest in opening a business there and cited her success in running Go Native in Austin as a credential to make a go of it in Banff.
Jackson was dead by the time they’d realized their plan, and when Guy and Louie made an occasional visit they were put up in a hotel. That had left only one person to consider: Randy.
He’d been the one who had inspired both of them to get out of Mercy Ridge.
Lily looked at her sister and asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Relieved. Maybe a bit sad.”
Annie knew Lily was asking her about Randy being dead.
“How about you?” Annie asked.
“The same, and a little scared, too.”
“About Tall Wolf?”
“Him, too. Where the hell did that guy come from?”
“He works for Marlene,” Annie said.
“Yeah, well, she should keep him the hell away from us.”
“She’s trying. My feeling was, Tall Wolf was only supposed to report to Marlene what the FBI was doing.”
Lily shook her head. “We think we’re so much smarter than men, even someone like Randy, but they still seem to get their way most of the time.”
“What else scares you?” Annie asked. “You said, ‘him, too,’ about Tall Wolf.”
“I’m more scared about what we’re becoming, you and me.”
Annie said, “It’s more than becoming; it’s what we already are. Randy was just the latest for both of us. If it makes you feel any better I have twice as much blood on my hands as you.”
“You haven’t lost a son,” Lily said.
“No, I’ve just abandoned two of them.”
“It seems like everything’s coming apart,” Lily said.
Annie nodded. “I sure as hell wish I had closed up my house in Rapid City a week earlier. Wish I hadn’t been so curious I had to go get a look at Tall Wolf. I didn’t tell you, but I was half-tempted to have someone slip something into one of his drinks, the way I did with Vern.”
“Why didn’t you?” Lily asked. “Would you have felt guilty this time?”
Annie shook her head. “He told me his mother’s a curandera. That scared me. Healers are supposed to be good people, but they make me nervous. They know too many secrets. Get one of them mad at you, who knows what she might do?”
“Jesus,” Lily said.
Annie saw her sister was looking out the window again.
Guy and Louie and a blonde-haired woman were coming up their walk.
“Who’s the woman?” Annie asked.
“Coy Wilson. Jackson’s old girlfriend.”
The sisters looked at each other, wondering the same thing.
What was going on here?
A block up Muskrat Street, John sat with SAC Melvin and Superintendent Kent in an Itasca Reyo. With them were Sergeant Bramley and another Mountie, both in plain clothes. The motorhome was parked in the driveway of a cooperating resident. A moment earlier, the five cops had heard Coy, Guy and Louie do a final check of the body mikes they wore.
Coy and Guy had gone with the standard, “Testing. One, two, three.”
Louie had ad libbed. “Hey, Mom gets locked up, who gives me my allowance?”
Melvin and Kent exchanged a look of concern.
John said, “He’s just messing with us.”
He hoped so, anyway. They were working off his plan. The three young people were going to do the heavy lifting, and then John would step in and wrap things up.
Melvin had wanted to do the star turn that brought the curtain down.
Kent overruled him. “This is Special Agent Tall Wolf’s show. We’ll let him carry it off.”
Or not.
There was an element of risk. Everyone in the vehicle considered the sisters to be cunning killers. Whether their disregard for life would extend to their offspring and the de facto widow of a lost son was an open question. If things went wrong …
Even Melvin could see Kent’s point.
Let the Indian carry the weight.
Kent’s offer to buy John a drink notwithstanding.
They heard a doorbell ring and a door open.
Lily exclaimed, “Coy!”
Annie cried out, “ Guy, Louie!”
“Reception five by five,” said the Mountie monitoring the audio recorder.
Perfect.
Kerry Colcroft was a high honors graduate of McGill Law. Her father, a senior partner at a Toronto law firm, had paid for his daughter’s education and had guided her in a choice of careers from the time she had turned twelve.
“Family law, Daddy? Divorces?” Kerry had asked when told what her lot in life would be.
“People are forever choosing the wrong mates, my dear. You’ll never lack for work.”
Charles Colcroft also hoped that witnessing the messes people made of their lives would incline his only child to be judicious in choosing her own husband. In truth, he hoped she would allow him to arrange a marriage for her.
Kerry disappointed her father in many ways.
She went into criminal defense work, and she moved to the West to become Colin McTee’s associate. She was still dealing with people who’d botched their lives, but there was drama, grit and excitement to the work far beyond the cliché of extramarital sex. If her father were still speaking to her, though, he might be pleased to learn that she had decided she would never take up with anyone who so much as fudged his tax returns.
Criminals invariably overestimated their own intelligence.
Mr. McTee on the other hand —
Three people walked up to the door of the house on Muskrat Street she’d been assigned to watch from the car she used to circle the block. The car Annie and Lily might have noticed had they not been so self-preoccupied.
Mr. McTee was smart enough to have her safeguard his clients.
Watch for the police or anyone else to approach them.
If that were to happen, he’d told her, she need do only one thing.
Call him at once.
Lily hugged Coy. She had always liked the girl, always loved the music she and Jackson had made together. They could have made it big time if they’d chosen any name for the band other than Red Hawk. The use of her late husband’s name had worried Lily. Mentioning it to Randy and the public notice it might bring had led to their argument over how to handle the matter. The dispute had started the chain of events that led to Jackson’s death.
Randy had told Lily that if Jackson didn’t change the band’s name maybe he’d cut off one or two of the boy’s guitar-playing fingers. See how well he could play then. Or maybe he’d just tell Jackson it was dear old Mom who’d plugged Red Hawk
.
Lily hadn’t cared for either idea, but Randy said he had to do something because he sure as hell wasn’t going to get locked up after all this time.
Annie loved her sons. She just had a problem looking at them. They both resembled their father, the likeness growing stronger as they got older. A sense of chill surprise struck Annie that it wouldn’t be long before Guy and Louie reached the age at which Vern had died.
Her epiphany led to fear. Would her sons live longer than their father had? There was no reason to think they wouldn’t. Unless they met someone like her. She had loved Vern; she just hadn’t been able to forget Randy. When Vern was off on a road trip with the team, Annie made excuses to travel, too. She flew down to Las Vegas for weekends with Randy.
She didn’t do it every time Vern traveled, but he thought she should stay home.
All the time. He was the one making the money, he said, and lots of it.
Annie loved the money, but not having it used as a threat against her. She’d never admitted going off to see a man. It hadn’t occurred to her in the early days that Vern might be fooling around on the road. Then the wife of a teammate told Annie that her husband had something serious going on with a woman in Toronto, and she better find a lawyer to protect her interests.
She went to Randy instead. Problem solved. Shame about Teddy and Bill, though.
She hadn’t asked for that.
Looking at her sons now, she realized that Vern never would have abandoned them emotionally, the way she had. He might have found another wife, but he would have come on the run had his boys needed him. He would have taken care of her financially, as long as his divorce lawyer hadn’t found out about Randy. Which he almost certainly would have.
She’d really had no choice.
Hell of a thing, the way life could work out.
The phone rang in the house on Muskrat Street.
Annie said, “I’ll get it.” Everyone in the room watched her say hello. She listened for a moment and said, “No, no. Everything’s fine. My sons and a friend of Lily’s, that’s all.”