The Unforgivable Fix

by T. E. Woods

  Allie’s face relaxed. Her voice slithered down several octaves, from impetuous coed to throaty alto. “At least you’re done pretending I’m wrong about you being The Fixer. Now, what is it you want to tell me about Patrick? Have they found him? Is he saying all manner of awful things about me?”

  “Return the favor I’ve just shown you by being direct and honest with me. Yes, they’ve found Patrick. And you know he hasn’t said a word about you. You made sure of that.”

  Allie shrugged. “Perhaps he loved me as much as he said. Or maybe he’s simply more of a gentleman than I gave him credit for.”

  “Or perhaps he’s as dead as you intended him to be.” Lydia opened the sheet of notepaper she held. “Your father tells me the coroner estimates Patrick was murdered two days ago…early afternoon. Isn’t it amazing how well they can pinpoint the time of death?”

  Allie’s eyes widened. “Patrick’s dead?” Her hand went to her throat. “Murdered? Do they think it’s the Russian?” She started to stand. “I need to go lie down.”

  “Stay where you are,” Lydia ordered. “And yes, they think it’s the Russian. And it probably was. What with his hands being cut off and all. Sounds like the kind of revenge Tokarev would take for what Patrick did to his lover. But your poor dad…he’s still up there in Seattle burning the midnight oil trying to figure out who tipped Patrick off. They surmise it’s the same person who set him up with Tokarev.”

  Allie nodded. “Makes sense.” She was very pale.

  “What your father doesn’t know is that his daughter is the one he’s looking for.”

  Allie sat quietly for several heartbeats. Lydia appreciated her lack of denial.

  Lydia smoothed her hands over the note. “You and Patrick lived a glamorous, expensive life where anything you dreamed was yours.”

  Allie nodded. “You have no idea. I’d always heard that phrase: ‘money is no object.’ Well, of course money is always an object. There are always limits. Except with Patrick. His business made anything—and I mean anything—possible. You’d have to live it to have any notion what that means.”

  “But that life came with a cost,” Lydia continued. “It was dangerous. You and Patrick were on top, which meant you were the target. Not only for international law-enforcement agencies, but also for bad guys. I imagine in your world, those were the only folks you could associate with. I seriously doubt the local Rotary Club puts out a welcome mat for a drug lord or his woman.”

  Allie bristled. “Are we going to insult one another now, Lydia? At least I lived as who I am.” She spread her arms wide to indicate the entire room in which she sat. “I didn’t window-dress to make myself socially acceptable. I’m not that much of a coward.”

  Lydia pressed on. “So, there you two are, Patrick and Allie…Olwen, as he called you. Living large, surrounded by danger. It would make sense that the two of you would have plans to keep safe.” She looked at her notes. “Patrick was angry when he picked up your call. Who could blame him? You up and disappear on him. He has no idea if you’re handing him over to the police or to another crime syndicate. But then you said ‘I love you to the moon and back’ and he settled right down.”

  “It’s dangerous to live with a man like Patrick.” Allie was calm and direct in her explanation. “My power was his love for me. If he was angry, it was because he thought I’d left him. Once he knew I still cared, his anger disappeared. It’s been like that our entire time together.”

  “I think it’s a code. A seemingly innocent expression of love. I think you and Patrick worked it out very early in your relationship. ‘I love you to the moon and back’ means…what? We’re being monitored? Recorded? Did you have one code for the police and another one if it was a bad guy forcing you to lure him somewhere? I think Patrick Duncan calmed down because the two of you had rehearsed it and he was settling in for what came next.”

  Allie crossed her legs and leaned back. Her right foot began to swing back and forth. Not much, but enough for Lydia to note her mounting tension. “And what is it you think came next, Lydia?”

  “The true place you wanted him to meet you. I think you two had a system worked out. Stay away from the place I’m telling you to go because there’s going to be an ambush there. However, pay attention and I’ll tell you where and when I’ll meet you.”

  Allie’s leg continued its swing.

  “You said, ‘If only the gods would grant us one wish.’ Now that’s a phrase you don’t hear every day. I think that means ‘Here’s where I want to meet you.’ You then alluded, in the vaguest and most romantic terms, to the place you first met. You even asked him, in that dreamy voice of yours, if he remembered it. He said he did. He gave another odd phrase. ‘Our souls are in communion.’ I’m sure that little romantic coo turned your father’s stomach. Little did he know Patrick wasn’t pitching sappy woo to his daughter. Patrick was telling you he understood exactly where he was supposed to meet you. You told me you met Patrick at a rave in an abandoned warehouse down in the Seattle port district.” Lydia tilted her head. “Guess where they found his body?”

  Allie said nothing.

  “The coroner placed time of death as early afternoon. The police wanted you to get Patrick to your dad’s houseboat at two thirty. Early afternoon. I think the system you two had worked out allowed for always going with the same time as you were being instructed. Brilliant, by the way. I don’t know how you could transmit time in code. It’s far easier to just go along with the same time the police were asking you to use. Just on another day. Patrick died two days after he was supposed to be arrested. In your phone call you suggestively teased him with what you wanted to do when you saw him. Again, an awkward moment for your father, but one we assumed you created to ensure Patrick would be there. You teased him by saying ‘and…and…’ then coyly stopping. He responded by repeating ‘and…and…’ Each ‘and’ meant one day. So, right there, under your father’s watchful eye—knowing full well you were being recorded—you very succinctly conveyed to Patrick ‘We’re being monitored. They’re expecting you at two thirty tomorrow. Come two days later, at two-thirty, to the warehouse where we first met. I’ll be there.’ Very clever. The code worked exactly as you two intended. But Patrick never planned for your betrayal. You knew Tokarev would come after you in retaliation for what Patrick did and saved yourself by offering him Patrick.”

  Allie uncrossed and recrossed her leg. This time it was her left leg that swayed. “That’s an interesting story. But without proof, that’s all it is.”

  Lydia nodded. “You’re right. But circumstantial cases have been known to hold up in court. This one just might. Then you’d be facing felony murder charges. But let’s say it didn’t hold up in court. Would it hold up to your father? Your brother? Could they lay this story next to the life they know you’ve led and come up with something different? Or would they forever know that you sent a man who trusted you—despicable as he was—to a horrible death to save your own skin?”

  “You’ve gone to my father with this?”

  Lydia let her simmer in the possibility for a few moments. “I haven’t. What we have here is a strategy of mutually assured destruction. Should you decide to offer me to the authorities in exchange for them letting you walk away from your involvement with Patrick Duncan’s drug empire, I’ll fill them in on the particulars of Patrick’s murder. I’m sure they have the resources to change my circumstantial case into one with hard evidence behind it. On the other hand, should I decide to tell anyone what I’ve learned about your code and how it not only obstructed justice but led to Duncan’s torturous death, you can counter with your suspicions of my being The Fixer. You see? We now have nothing to fear from each other’s knowledge.”

  Allie held Lydia’s gaze as she considered her situation. After a while, she nodded. “You’re very good at what you do. Does all that psychological training help?”

  “It doesn’t hurt.” Lydia decided to test another theory. “Why did you send those two men her
e?”

  Allie smiled as though Lydia had just asked about the secret to her special lemon pie. “So it’s to be an evening of total honesty, is it? No more talk of wolves prowling your property? I needed to stay relatively free. If Dad turned me over to the authorities, they’d have me in a monitored holding cell. I needed freedom to communicate with associates. I contacted one of Patrick’s men. He had strong reason to want Patrick dead. I made that happen for him. In exchange, he agreed to send two of his own men to come put a scare into you and Dad. But you let me down. What was supposed to have happened was these two were to make a fake raid on the house. I even had them wait until Dad was gone, so there’d be no chance of anyone actually engaging them. They’d come in, maybe tie us up…say something about how they were working for Tokarev. They’d say someone in the DEA told them where I was and they were here to kill us. I’d make them a promise of money, they’d leave us alone, and you and I would tell a frantic Mort Grant we had to be moved somewhere safer, but certainly not anywhere any cop would know.” She shook her head in admiration. “I didn’t know at the time I was dealing with The Fixer. I assume the two are dead?”

  This time it was Lydia who said nothing.

  “I’ll accept your mutually assured destruction pact, Lydia. But I want you to know I was sincere when I told you I have no intention of ever telling anyone who you are. I mean that.”

  “What do you mean? And what are you two still doing up?” Mort came through the front door looking like he was on his last burst of energy. “It’s nearly one A.M.”

  Allie ran to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Her posture changed as she shifted back into the role of Mort Grant’s precocious little troublemaker. “Liddy and I have been talking a blue streak, Daddy. I guess we’ve lost all track of time.”

  Mort walked into the living room, his arm around his daughter and his eyes on Lydia. “What could be so interesting that kept you two up so late?”

  Allie giggled and winked at Lydia. “What else, Daddy? Boys and clothes.”

  Chapter 50

  Lydia was exhausted. She clicked on the lights in her office, but the gloom shrouding her had little to do with the dark, drizzly morning. She hadn’t slept. Instead, her thoughts tortured her with the delicate balance she and Allie now found themselves living. Allie was capable of extreme measures. If Mort couldn’t stop his daughter from being arrested, and even he doubted he could, Allie might still turn on them both if she thought it would help her case.

  I have everything arranged. The house, the money…all I need is a little time.

  She’d almost made that final ascent up her cliff last night. She’d left Allie with her bone-weary father and headed off to her room. Lydia had pulled her climbing boots out of her closet and was changing her clothes when the image of Hank Trow flooded her awareness. His only daughter had accused him of horrific deeds, yet he did nothing to defend himself. Instead Hank set about looking for help. He’d come to Lydia. At the time, she knew nothing about Zach’s scheme to implant false memories into Brianna Trow.

  But she did now. He’d tried the same thing with Heather Blankenship. How many others were unwitting subjects in Zach’s twisted experiment? Did his activities go beyond his work in Lydia’s clinic?

  The weight of responsibility pressed against Lydia’s shoulders and chest. She had welcomed him into her practice, had assigned patients to him, had trusted him to do his best. It was Lydia who blindly accepted Zach’s tapes as authentic. Even after Hank Trow’s visit, when Zach feigned astonishment, Lydia believed Zach.

  This is on you. You made this mess. You have to fix this. Or else this becomes like everything else you touch: a steaming pile of shit.

  Lydia put her exit plans on hold, lay awake for hours, and finally pulled herself into the shower at a little past five.

  Once she was at her desk, she began making a list of all the patients she’d assigned Zach. She’d call each of them Monday morning and schedule a time to meet. Her own calendar would have to take a backseat. Determining the extent of Zach Edwards’s damage was her top priority.

  She needed to fix this before the cops came for Allie.

  She then assembled a box of evidence for Paul Bauer, some of it duplicates of what she’d already given him. It was only a matter of time before the detective presented a court order demanding every shred of paper associated with Zach Edwards, and she wanted it ready in case she wasn’t available to hand it to him herself. She duplicated every digital recording Zach made of his sessions with patients. For extra measure, she ran each through the program that produced hard-copy transcripts. She made copies of every case note Zach ever wrote. As she tucked in a reprint of Zach’s report to the judge, she was thankful Zach had only done an assessment of Will Sorens’s daughter. The thought of Zach manipulating a girl so young—one who had actually experienced abuse at the hands of her stepfather—chilled Lydia to her most ancient core.

  Lydia was brewing her second pot of coffee in preparation for listening again to each of Zach’s recordings, when the door to her office chimed. Lydia froze and focused on sounds. The main door to the converted mansion that served as her office building would be open. There were accountants and lawyers on other floors who often saw clients on the weekend. But Lydia never saw patients on Saturday. She was certain she had kept the main door to her office suite locked when she came in hours earlier. Lydia stepped to her desk drawer.

  “Who’s there?” she called out.

  Footsteps approached. Lydia slid the drawer open.

  “It’s me, Dr. Corriger.” Zach Edwards entered her office with a sheepish grin. He held up a tie-dyed lanyard with the keys Lydia had given him when he began his work there. “I came by to drop something off. Hope I didn’t frighten you.” He slid a battered canvas bag off his shoulder. “What are you doing here today? I figured you for a person who’d be out antiquing or trying some new brunch place on a Saturday morning.” His words were clipped and tight.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Zach. I made that perfectly clear.”

  Zach shook his head. “No, you didn’t. What you made clear was that you didn’t want me seeing patients. You also made clear it was because you said someone had called, telling you there was something fishy on my résumé.” His eyes widened. “I wrote the damned thing. I know better than anyone that every word on it is true and accurate. So I went home and called each and every faculty member, supervisor, and clinic manager who ever had anything to do with my clinical training. I asked them if they’d called you. Certainly you can’t blame me. If someone called your boss talking trash about you, wouldn’t you follow up?”

  Lydia had fabricated the lie on the spot. She needed to give Paul Bauer time to find out whose voice was on the tapes Zach had dummied up for her.

  “No one called you, Dr. Corriger.” He reached for his bag and Lydia’s hand made a subtle move toward her gun.

  “So I asked myself a question.” Zach spoke as he fumbled through his bag. “Why would you say such a thing? Why would you block me from seeing patients?” He pulled a flash drive out of his bag and laid it on Lydia’s desk. His hands were shaking.

  “What’s that?”

  “A recording of conversations you and I had here in this office.” Zach stood and pulled his bag over his shoulder. “I’ve always been impressed with the technology in this space. You wouldn’t have thought it, what with the building being over a hundred years old and all. It must have cost you a fortune to have such state-of-the-art digital capability installed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, Zach, but you’re done here. Leave your keys and go. I’ll call Dr. Luther and let her know things didn’t work out the way she’d hoped.” Lydia didn’t want to tip Zach off to Bauer’s investigation. “It’ll be up to you to fill her in on the details.”

  “I spoke with her after you tossed me out of here. I told her how bewildered I was. Dr. Luther knows the kind of student and clinician I am. She shared with me that you told her your co
ncerns regarding my…what did she say you said? My sloppiness with patients.” He looked down at his scuffed shoes. “And she scolded me about how you told her you basically had to rewrite the Emma Sorens report. I told her how uncomfortable I was, but that I did, indeed, basically submit exactly what you told me to, word for word.” His voice sounded apologetic. “Thanks for telling Dr. Luther about that.”

  “Leave, Zach. I don’t want to have to call the police.”

  Zach nodded. “I know you think you have things all figured out. But before you call anyone, listen to that flash drive. Don’t worry about returning it. I have a copy.” He dropped his keys on Lydia’s desk. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Corriger. Believe it or not, I really did learn a lot from you. You’re a great teacher.” He hung his head and turned away.

  She waited for the sound of the creaking door, then went to the window to watch him leave. Lydia wasn’t surprised to find Patty waiting in the rusted Volvo to drive her boyfriend home.

  Lydia picked up the flash drive. Zach had mentioned nothing about his off-the-books research project. He had to know that if she came forward with what she knew, no university would ever hire him. Zach was an ambitious young man who’d thrown away a promising future. She wondered what next step he was planning.

  Zach’s words floated back to her. I know you think you have things all figured out. Was Zach giving her a recording of the actual sessions he had with Brianna Trow? Was there another reason Zach dummied up recordings of his sessions with her? She plugged in the flash drive and called up the only file on the device. The first voice she heard was her own.

  “You do this or I will.”

  Lydia remembered using that stern tone when she needed Zach to stop hesitating on his report to CPS about Heather Blankenship’s allegations of sexual abuse. She now understood. He didn’t want to make the call because he hadn’t had the time yet to fully convince Heather that the nonexistent abuse had happened.