The detective at the door straightened, and Lansing and the third detective both stood as well. All three watched Lloyd intently to make certain he didn’t do anything stupid. Lansing continued to read Lloyd his rights. When he finished, he reached behind his back and took out a pair of handcuffs with which he quickly cuffed Lloyd, hands in front.
“We’re going to take your client to be booked, Mr. Aldritch,” Lansing said, finally addressing the attorney again. “You’re welcome to come with us.”
As if they had rehearsed it numerous times, the detectives smoothly escorted Lloyd from the room, Lansing and the detective at the table each taking an arm, the detective in shirtsleeves dropping in behind them. Lansing opened the door with his free hand to go into the hall. That was when I made my mistake.
I suppose, in hindsight, I should have stayed in the room. But I had to see Lloyd. I wanted to see, without any mirrors or videotapes between us, the look on his face as the evil he had set in motion finally caught up with him. I bolted from the room and into the hallway where Lansing and the detectives were entering with Lloyd.
“Sutton,” Ken called, coming out the door behind me.
At my name, Lloyd and the cops all looked up. Lansing’s face told me I had done the wrong thing. But it was Lloyd whose face said the most. The marble that had held his face immobile all during the videotape melted, and his cold expression transformed itself into one of pure hatred and murderous fury.
“You cunt!” Lloyd screamed, and then with an inarticulate bellow of rage, he tore himself free of the detectives and bodychecked me, slamming me into the wall. The back of my head hit with a loud thud, and both of us fell to the floor. Lloyd was on top of me and used his handcuffed fists to backhand me across the left eye. When the cops and Ken pulled him off me, he had his hands around my throat, fully intending to choke the life out of me right there in the police station.
It was total chaos.
Lloyd was screaming at me, every foul, putrid name that lived in his vile brain. Lansing and the other detectives were trying to wrestle him to the floor to subdue him, but his rage made him incredibly strong. Cops were running in from everywhere. Ken and Bill Russell were bent over me, partly to shield me from Lloyd and partly to make sure he hadn’t killed me.
Somehow, during their struggles with him, Lloyd managed to take the gun from the holster of the shirtsleeved detective who had stood by the interrogation-room door.
“Gun!” the detective shouted as he felt his pistol sliding out of the holster and realized what had happened. All three detectives immediately loosened their holds and backpedaled away from Lloyd, who fell to his knees, the police pistol looking huge in his hands.
The room was suddenly as quiet as death.
“Get back!” Lloyd screamed, waving the gun in wild arcs in front of him, forcing the detectives to step farther away from him.
When the gun in Lloyd’s hands came to a stop, it was pointed at me. His eyes were enough to stop my heart.
You’re dead, my voice said.
That makes two of us, I told it.
All I could do was stare back at Lloyd.
Lansing moved to stand between Lloyd and me. He had his own gun out, pointed at Lloyd.
“Don’t do it, Senator,” he ordered. “It’s a standoff. You shoot her. I shoot you.” Their eyes locked.
And then, with one more roar, Lloyd turned the gun around, and in one swift movement, put it in his mouth.
I screamed.
Lansing shouted, “No!” and dove to grab the gun. But his brain understood what was happening faster than his body could move to stop it.
Before Lansing could reach him, Lloyd had pulled the trigger.
It was a nightmare, a scene from some hellish abattoir.
“Goddamn it!,” Lansing yelled, more than once, and pounded his fist impotently on the wall.
Lloyd’s blood and brains were sprayed all over the cops and Aldritch and the floor and walls behind them. His body had folded to the floor, where the rest of his blood was now pumping out and puddling beneath his mutilated head. His eyes still looked at me, now vacantly, as if the incredible anger they had mirrored was draining away with the blood on the floor.
As I tried to sit up straighter and assess the damage Lloyd had done to me, I knew it was a scene I would wake up to in a cold sweat for weeks or months to come.
* * * *
Obviously, the rest of the day proved to be a little hectic.
First, I had to sit still while Ken, Bill, and Lansing, and then an ambulance crew from the fire and rescue station next door made certain that my rapidly swelling and purpling eye was the only real injury Lloyd had inflicted. Thankfully, I got to go sit in the lunchroom while they inspected me. Getting my checkup a few feet from Lloyd’s body would have been rough, even for me.
Once we knew I would live, Lansing said someone would be in shortly to get statements from Ken and me. He left to go back to the hallway, where crime-scene investigators already were beginning to process the evidence. Bill said the rest of the press pack had gathered outside already, but they were being given nothing substantive.
Ken and I used the time to call Rob from the pay phone in the lunchroom. Ken gave him the synopsis and my prognosis and then handed the phone, over which I could hear Rob yelling, to me. Rob ran out of expletives long before I finished filling him in on the details of what had happened.
“As soon as they’ll let you out of there, you and Ken haul ass back here,” Rob said, when I reached the end.
“Thanks for your concern over my well-being,” I told him sarcastically.
“Stop breaking my ass, McPhee,” Rob said. “Hale says you’re fine, and you and I both know you’re too goddamned hardheaded for anything to make a dent up there!”
It was, of course, the right thing to say. By pissing me off and throwing down a challenge, Rob ensured that I wasn’t going to sit around brooding or feeling sorry for myself.
“Besides,” he went on, “the cops won’t be able to keep this out of the rest of the press. But by God, our stories will blow everybody else out of the water!”
He was right. They did.
Friday
Thirty-one
It was Friday afternoon before I got to talk to Noah Lansing again. We both had our hands full, he with putting together all the details of the case against Hub Taylor, and me with staying a jump or two ahead of the rest of the press on the follow-up stories to Lloyd’s suicide and Taylor’s arrest.
Bill Russell called me on Thursday morning, ordered me to have lunch with him, and then said I wasn’t leaving the restaurant until I told him everything that had gone on during mine and Lansing’s little tête-à-tête with Hub Taylor and my earlier visit to Lloyd. When I was finished with the story and we were having our last cups of coffee, he nodded his head up and down.
“Yep, that’s pretty much what I heard from Lansing,” he said, grinning.
“Well, if you already got all this from him, why the hell did you need to hear it again from me?” I asked, irritated. “And what are you grinning about?”
“Just looking out for you, Sutton. God knows someone should! Although maybe it’s time to let Lansing share in the responsibility.”
“Kiss my ass, and you can pick up the check,” I told him huffily, completely violating the ethical proscription that says reporters never take freebies from sources. Of course, some sources need disciplining more than others.
I didn’t get any more phone calls from Sy Berkowitz about taking over my story, but Rob eventually did pass along the news that Berkowitz had gotten both his and Mark Lester’s asses in a sling over some dipshit story Berkowitz had come up with about one of the big cheeses at the White House. Word apparently got back to the chief of staff that Berkowitz was calling up and down the East Coast, making noises about the guy having ties to the mob. Unfortunately for Sy, none of his “evidence” panned out. He and Lester got paid a memorable visit by some guys from 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue and from FBI headquarters that made them forget all about anything the rest of us were working on.
My biggest problem was that I was having bad dreams nightly in which I faced Ed Lloyd over the detective’s gun again, and I soon was exhausted from lack of sleep. When Cara was murdered, I was grief-stricken and in mourning for a long time, but the fear I had felt when her killers attempted to kill me, too, eventually had been lessened by my testimony against them, testimony that put them in prison where they couldn’t come after me again. With their threat to me neutralized, I had been able to lock the fear away in some mental closet where it couldn’t reach me.
But Lloyd had forced open that closet door, and this time I couldn’t seem to push my fears away through willpower alone. Even Lloyd’s suicide and Taylor’s arrest didn’t seem to help me escape the effects of my brush with death, effects that continued to ambush me at unexpected moments and in dreams. Eventually, I decided to make an appointment with a therapist named Elizabeth Parks, a former high-school guidance counselor I had met when I covered the Fairfax County schools, who had gone back for a Ph.D. in psychology and now was in private practice. Her confident reassurance when I called her and described my problem made me feel less reluctant about going the therapy route. Admitting my vulnerabilities was not something I enjoyed.
It also helped that Maggie Padgett and Ann Kane’s fathers both called to thank me for helping prove what Lloyd had done to their daughters, and I knew their thanks would stay with me much longer than the bad dreams or even the glow of satisfaction I got from our stories.
Ken and I wrote all the stories under a shared byline. For one thing, it was too hard to figure out where the Ann Kane story left off and the Hub Taylor story began. For another, there was plenty of glory to go around. Ken deserved it as much as I did.
In the newsroom after my meeting with Bill Russell, Ken and I finished up our latest stories for Saturday’s paper and sent them to Rob’s computer queue. I told Rob and Ken I wanted to go back to the Great Falls police station one last time before the weekend just to make certain nothing new had gone on with the story. Ken said he would hang around until Rob edited the Saturday pieces, and that he would call me on my cell phone if Rob had any questions Ken couldn’t answer. The two of them waved me out the door.
It was after four when I got back out to the Great Falls station, so Jimmy had long since gone off shift. The evening duty officer called Lansing, who apparently told him to send me back, and the officer buzzed me through.
Lansing was signing papers when I parked myself in his doorway. He looked up.
‘That’s quite a shiner you’ve got there,” he said, straight-faced. It was an understatement. My left eye was still puffy and partially closed, and the skin around it and across my check sported every color of black, blue, and purple in the spectrum. It was also sore as hell.
“I just have this effect on people sometimes,” I replied, stepping inside the office and sitting down in one of the extra chairs.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” Lansing answered, now starting to smile. “I’ve even thought about doing the same thing a couple of times myself.”
“I’m sorry about Lloyd,” I told him, serious this time. “If I’d had any idea it was going to set him off that way, I wouldn’t have come out of the observation room.”
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’ll admit I was pissed off at you at first. I’d like to have seen him go to trial for what he did. On the other hand, there’s no way now for him to deny any of it, no way for him to get off because of who he is. Are you sure you’re okay? He really wanted to kill you.”
“I think he would have killed me if you hadn’t stepped between us. Kind of a stupid thing to do, wasn’t it?”
“No, I’d have shot the son of a bitch myself if he hadn’t saved me the trouble!”
He would have, too, I knew. For him, it would have been like shooting the guys who killed his wife.
“Does it surprise you that he killed himself?” I was still trying to put the pieces of what drove Lloyd together in my mind.
“Not really. He was a powerful guy, but he was a coward, too, a bully. He knew his career was down the tubes, that someone finally had stood up to him and was willing to call him what he was—in public. So instead of staying around to watch it all go in the toilet, he took the coward’s way out.”
“Yeah, and I suspect Hub Taylor is saying a few choice things about that right now, too.”
“Hub Taylor,” Lansing said, looking like he wanted to spit. “What a pathetic piece of shit he is! He sold his soul to Lloyd. I wonder if he thinks it was such a bargain now.”
“Anyway, thanks for keeping Lloyd from shooting me.
I was surprised you didn’t take longer to think about it.”
“Listen, Sutton,” he went on. It was the first time he had used my first name. I liked the sound of it. “About all that. I’d like to apologize for being so hard on you. I have to admit I was wrong about you. I’ll be done here in another ten minutes. Just to show you I’m not a total asshole, could I buy you a Guinness someplace?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.” I wasn’t supposed to drink with the pain medicine my doctor had given me, and besides, I just wanted to go home tonight and try to get some sleep. Lansing didn’t know all that, of course. He looked taken aback at my refusal.
“No, if you really want to make it up to me,” I told him, “you’re going to have to take me sailing again.”
He looked at me for long seconds, as if he were really seeing me for the first time.
“Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, Fort Washington Marina?” he asked.
You sure you want to start this? What about your job?
My mind, I realized, was long since made up. I would deal with the job somehow.
“I’ll be there, Detective.”
“Noah.”
“Okay, Noah.”
When I went out the door, he was smiling. So was I.
* * * *
That night, I dreamed I was in a meadow, walking, when Janet Taylor rode up on a magnificent bay horse. She was whole in the dream, her legs strong and healthy, and she was beautiful. She stopped the horse a couple of hundred yards away, and I stopped, too, uncertain what to do. She never spoke. She just looked at me for a long moment, then smiled and turned to ride away. The soft breeze brought me the scent of wild mint, crushed by the horse’s hooves. I inhaled it deeply and drifted farther away, into dreamless sleep where, for once, memory couldn’t follow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda English has worked in news reporting, communications and publications management, book editing, and media relations. She lives in Florida with her family.
ALSO BY BRENDA ENGLISH
SUTTON McPHEE MYSTERY SERIES
Corruption of Faith
Corruption of Power
Corruption of Justice
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Corruption of Justice
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