by Carr, Lauren
David said, “It’s hard to disprove an alibi when there are dozens of witnesses swearing that the suspect was hundreds of miles away someplace else.”
“Have you ever heard of a plane?” Chad scoffed.
Before David could respond, Mac asked, “Did you ever see Lee Dorcas threaten Katrina?”
“Everyone at Ingram and Henderson saw it,” Chad said with a nod of his head. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot her then. Katrina tried to calm him down, but he wouldn’t have it. Security finally showed up and hauled his ass out of the building.”
“What was he ranting about?” Mac asked.
“He insisted Katrina stole his grandmother’s money.”
“Had she?” Mac ignored David’s glare at the suggestion.
Chad’s expression became more smug when he replied, “I wouldn’t know any of the details pertaining to how Katrina conducted her accounts. She told me that the old lady spent it.”
Mac suppressed a grin. He could see that Chad had all the slimy qualities it took to be a lawyer. He had his suspicions about his late wife, but he knew better than to own up to them. It was to his legal advantage to claim that he had been misled.
Mac resumed the interview by asking, “That day Dorcas came to see Katrina at the law firm, did he threaten her?”
“He threatened to kill her. And now she’s dead and you have his body with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. As far as I’m concerned this case is closed.”
“The gunshot wound was not self-inflicted,” David told him. “That’s why the case is still open.”
Mac asked, “Did you hear Dorcas threaten to kill Niles Holt?”
Chad shook his head. “Katrina told me he threatened to do that on her wedding day. He showed up in her dressing room.”
“When did she tell you that?”
Chad sucked in a deep breath before shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t remember.”
“Was it before or after Niles died?” Mac inquired.
“After. She told me after we started seeing each other. I do remember that.”
David wondered, “If Dorcas had killed Katrina’s first husband, weren’t you concerned about becoming her second husband, especially when he was still terrorizing her?”
A questioning look crossed his face at the suggestion that marrying Katrina could have put his life in danger. Finally, Chad replied, “I figured Dorcas considered them even.”
“Suppose he wasn’t the one harassing her,” Mac suggested. “Did Katrina have any idea who else it could have been and why he had targeted her?”
“Why do most crazies target anyone? They’re nuts.”
“Did you ever see him?” Mac asked.
“Never. Like I said, he never showed up when I was around.”
David wanted to know, “If he never showed up when you were around, why didn’t you stay with her? As her husband, you should have protected her.”
“Because I had to be here in the city. Katrina chose to stay at Deep Creek. She was courting the county commission to change the zoning on some land Niles owned,” Chad explained. “She was afraid that if she didn’t babysit it that the zoning would fall through. It did as soon as she was dead.”
“Really?” Mac responded to the new information. “What happened to the land?”
Chad smirked. “I sold it for a nice profit. Now it’s someone else’s headache.” He stroked his new wife’s shoulder. “Since I married Rachel, I don’t want to spend as much time wheeling and dealing the way Katrina liked to. She wanted the power that comes with money. I intend to enjoy the luxuries it affords.”
With his eyes on Rachel, David asked, “How long have you two been seeing each other?”
She glanced up to Chad.
He answered, “We’ve been friends for a long time.”
“Katrina knew about your affair,” David said. “She had an appointment scheduled with her lawyer to change her will and file for divorce. Fortunately for you, she was murdered three days before that meeting took place.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Chad said. “The police already checked into that. I had an alibi.” He grinned down at Rachel. “A very lovely alibi.”
She extended her hand, on which she wore a sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds. “My Valentine’s Day present. Chad gave it to me the night of the blizzard after we got stranded together.”
Chad said, “I thought what the heck.”
David asked, “Before or after your assassin confirmed your wife’s death?”
“I resent that.”
“Dave?” The expression on Chad’s face told Mac that the interview he wasn’t obligated to grant them had ended.
David ignored Mac’s warning. “Come on. You married Katrina for her money but you also wanted Rachel. You could never have asked her to marry you as long as Katrina was alive.”
“If I was going to hire a hit man to kill Katrina, don’t you think I would’ve simply had it done instead of having it dragged out for months?”
“David has a point,” Mac said. “You would never have divorced Katrina. Monetarily, you had too much to lose. You couldn’t have married Rachel while you were married to Katrina. That’s bigamy. Why would you ask your mistress to marry you the same night your wife got killed if you didn’t know that she wasn’t going to be around to end the party?”
“This interview is over.”
After Chad slammed the door behind them, David apologized to Mac. “I guess I blew it.”
Mac punched the signal for the elevator to take them down to the garage. “He’s right. If he had paid to have Katrina killed, his assassin wouldn’t have tormented her for all those months.”
The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.
“If it wasn’t a professional hit, then it had to be personal.” Mac watched the numbers indicating their descent ten floors to the underground garage where he had parked the Viper three levels below ground.
The doors opened to let them out into the parking garage. When they passed the handicapped parking spaces next to the elevator, the back of a van opened. Three thugs dressed in black baggy clothes with caps pulled down over their ears spilled out. Two more joined them from the front seats on either side of the van.
Mac and David rounded the corner to take them to the back of the garage. When he turned the corner, Mac saw that instead of getting onto the elevator, the five men were sauntering several feet behind them. “Have you got your gun?” he asked David in a low voice.
“Yes. Do you?”
“Always.”
David tried to glance over his shoulder. The youths had picked up their pace to close the distance between them. “Are they after us?”
“Do you see anyone else for them to come after?” Mac stopped, whirled around, and yelled, “Are you crazy, man?”
His abrupt action caught the brute about to jump him by surprise. Before his attacker could regroup, the former cop grabbed him and the gun he had pulled out of his waistband. Mac whirled the youth around to use his body as a shield when his cohorts opened fire. Mac returned their fire with both fists; the gun he had taken from his own holster and the assailant’s gun still clutched in his hand.
In a matter of seconds, three young men lay dead on the cold gray pavement.
Meanwhile, David dropped back behind the Viper and fired three shots into the chest of a fourth shooter who charged directly into the police officer’s open fire. The kid dropped to the ground without one of his shots hitting its target.
David felt a rush of air and a sharp pain hit his bicep. Gripping his arm, he fell back behind the sports car.
All was quiet except for running feet and what sounded like a child’s laughter.
David looked up from his bleeding arm to see a boy smiling down at him. In the oversized clothes of his generation and the darkness of the parking garage at night, he looked like a man. Up close, under the glare of a nearby light, the boy’s baby face made him resemble a child playing dress-up in his daddy’s cl
othes. His gun too big to hold onto, he held it in a clumsy grip with both hands.
The boy pointed the gun into David’s face.
Braced to kill some mother’s child, David aimed his gun at the boy.
The blast of gunshots echoed throughout the garage.
David waited for the darkness of death to overtake him.
The boy’s eyes filled with surprise. His mouth dropped open. Blood spilled onto David’s pant leg. When the boy collapsed, instinctively David held him and patted his back as if to soothe the child in his death.
He looked up at Mac who was standing over the boy. He was ready to fire again if need be. “He would have killed you.”
“He isn’t even old enough to shave,” David objected.
“Those are the worst ones. They get enough practice killing to become pros by the time they do.”
Chapter Twelve
Less than two months after retiring from Georgetown’s detective squad, Mac Faraday returned. After a visit to the emergency room to mend David’s arm, they had a few hours’ sleep before meeting Detective Sam Groom at the Georgetown precinct about killing five members of a street gang called the Tarantulas.
Even though Georgetown was out of the Crystal City, Virginia, jurisdiction where the shooting took place, Mac called his former colleague to uncover the motive behind a DC street gang’s attempted hit on a retired cop.
Mac had made it a point to wear the suit that his daughter had forced him to have tailored. He also parked his Viper next to Lieutenant Harold Fitzwater’s broken-down Dodge. He hated to admit that he wanted to rub his former boss’s nose in his windfall. In addition to the suit and car, he brought two boxes of donuts and a carafe of Starbucks coffee for the detectives—the way to his former colleagues’ hearts.
In the detectives’ squad room, Mac was mobbed by the old gang. After a discussion about the good life of a multi-millionaire, Tony, one of the older detectives, announced, “Hey, Mac, you should have seen Harold this morning. Sam made the mistake of telling him about you taking out five Tarantulas.”
“Costello told me that one of them didn’t have any diamonds on his back, yet,” said a chubby cop. His fellow cops called him Buddy because he was everyone’s friend.
Tony said, “Guess last night was his initiation. Lucky thing for us he failed.”
“What do you mean about diamonds on his back?” David asked.
Mac explained, “The Tarantulas mark their members with tattoos of a black spider on the back of their neck. The gang member gets a red diamond on the back of the spider for each of his kills.”
“If the kill is a cop, then the tarantula gets a white diamond,” Tony said without humor.
Mac went on, “If the gang accepts you, then you get the tattoo of the spider. All you get to do is hang out without them killing you, but you aren’t a full member until you earn your first diamond.”
“By killing someone,” David said. “That kid last night—”
“He had no diamonds. He was looking for you to get him his first one. It would have been white.”
“That would have made him a real big man on the streets,” Tony said. “That’s what every Tarantula dreams of: for his first diamond to be a white one.”
David asked, “How did they know we were cops? We weren’t in uniform.”
“Someone had to have told them. Crystal City isn’t their turf,” Tony said. “Word on the street is they were looking for someone. It had to be you.”
“Which makes it self-defense,” Mac said.
“And Harold is cussing a blue streak because it didn’t go down on his turf so that he could hang you out to dry,” Buddy said.
“Even if it was,” Tony said, “he doesn’t have enough political pull anymore to make it stick since his good friend Steve is on the fast track to hell.”
“Steve is on the fast track to hell?” Mac tried to keep from smiling about the misfortune of the assistant district attorney who had caused his divorce.
“He screwed up royally,” Buddy told him. “He slept with the defense attorney for the Garland case. While he was in the shower, she went through his drawers, and not the drawers he wanted her to go through. She got information on the case that he didn’t want her to have and Garland walked.” The big man laughed. “Now Steve spends his days working night court and his lap dog Fitzwater lost his pull in the DA’s office.”
Mac said, “What goes around comes around.”
“Hey, Faraday, you’re here early,” a bald-headed man with a bushy mustache yelled through the crowd from the doorway. “After getting me out of bed after midnight, you better have saved one of those donuts for me.”
Mac reached into the box and found that he was lucky. They had left one chocolate cream-filled donut, Sam’s favorite. He held it up to show the detective. “This one has your name on it.”
Mac and David followed the wave of Sam’s hand out into the corridor and down the hall to an interrogation room. For the first time, Mac found himself sitting on the opposite side of the table, facing the two-way mirror. The position felt odd.
While Sam opened up his folder and notepad, David asked, “Have they IDd the victims from the shooting last night?”
“They got IDs,” the detective answered. “Each one was a Tarantula. One of the guys in the gang unit says they got orders last night to take out a couple of off-duty cops.”
Mac asked, “From who?”
“Someone on their board,” Sam said. “It had to be done last night or today. They were told that you would be driving a red Viper.”
“How many red Vipers were there in that parking garage? They simply searched until they found your car, and then they waited for the guys that went with it.” David asked the detective, “What did you mean when you said that the order came from someone on their board? They’re a bunch of kids playing with real guns. They certainly aren’t incorporated.”
“Gangs are becoming sophisticated and enterprising. The Tarantulas have backing from a mob in Philadelphia, the Marlstone family.”
While the detective continued, Mac sat up straight in his chair.
“The feds have been after the Marlstones for years. They’re small but growing. They run drugs, prostitution, and illegal arms. People are afraid of street gangs. So the mob puts the gang on the payroll to do their dirty street work while they pull strings from their corporate offices, kind of like the board of directors giving orders to their minions on the assembly line.” Noticing Mac sitting up in his seat, Sam asked, “Did you ever have any cases against the Marlstones?”
“Peter Marlstone,” Mac said. “Nine years ago, his wife, Brianna, was found dead in the tub in their penthouse overlooking the river.”
“Peter was the nephew of the CEO, Reginald Marlstone,” Sam told them. “He was fifth in line to run the empire after his uncle and three cousins.”
Mac recalled, “We discovered that Brianna’s father was Hector Sanchez, Marlstone’s partner in crime. They’re from the Southwest.”
“Texas?” David asked.
“Houston, I believe,” Mac said.
“Pay Back’s destination after killing Katrina,” said David.
“Small world,” Mac replied. “Peter called his wife’s death an accident. When I revisited the case a couple of years later, I found physical evidence with technology we didn’t have before that proved she was murdered. But when I went looking for him, Peter Marlstone was gone. Right now, there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest.”
“I can do you one better on that.” Sam grinned. “Information from the feds says that Hector Sanchez put out a contract on Peter Marlstone. The Sanchezes and Marlstones are no longer partners. They’re enemies, thanks to Peter, who disappeared after embezzling millions of dollars from the Sanchez family. If he isn’t dead, he’s hiding deep in the underground.”
“And what a better place to lay low than on a lake in a small town in the woods,” Mac said.
David said to Mac, “You can’t
be talking about Pete Mason.”
“Cosmetic surgery. Cheek implants. Nose job. He must have lost about thirty pounds and pumped himself up. I knew I’d seen him before, but couldn’t place him.” Mac asked David, “When did he show up in Deep Creek Lake?”
“Maybe five years ago.” David corrected himself. “He’s been mayor for four years and lived in Deep Creek a couple of years before that. More like six.”
Sam said, “Marlstone calls in his old gang.”
“If Peter ordered the Tarantulas to kill us, then that means he still has connections to the family business,” Mac said.
Realizing that he was right, Sam sat back in his chair. “He’s working behind the scenes. Easy to do nowadays between computers, blackberries, and the Internet.”
“Is there anybody else on that contract Sanchez put out on Marlstone?” asked Mac.
Sam squinted at him. “Who do you have in mind?”
“Pete Mason brought in a friend that he made police chief in Spencer.” Mac laughed. “How better to run an illegal business than to have a good buddy be the chief of police? Any thoughts on who he might be?”
Sam chuckled. “Tall skinny guy? Real nervous type?”
David and Mac nodded their heads.
“Marlstone had help stealing that money from the Sanchez family. Their accountant, Roy Herman. One night, Herman had taken one too many Valium with one too many drinks and got behind the wheel. He killed a couple of teenage girls. Marlstone bailed him out. Forty-eight hours after that, they were gone with fifteen million dollars of Sanchez’s money.”
“So they are wanted by both the police and the mob.” David sucked in a deep breath. “And Spencer has been depending on a pencil-pushing mob accountant for our safety and security. No wonder Katrina got killed.”
Mac asked Sam, “Did the Holts have any connection to the Marlstone or Sanchez family?”
“I’ll put in a call to our connection with the feds to find out. Marlstone probably ordered the hit because you recognized him.”
“Someone killed both Niles Holt and his wife,” Mac said. “Peter Marlstone is a killer. He’s worth taking a closer look at.”