“Darren?” she said again, louder than before.
From the utter darkness of that second doorway, she thought she heard something. She froze still and pointed the gun that way. She drew in a shuddering breath.
“Darren?” she repeated, forcing a firmness into her voice that she did not feel. “Darren, I have a gun. If you’re there, call out.”
Behind her, a rustling noise, like the sound of laundry being piled from the dryer into the basket.
A second shadow grew, tangled inside her own. It began hunched and small, then drew forth across the room until it twinned with hers.
“I have a gun, too,” said the shadow, its voice behind her an empty monotone.
Issabella spun and pulled the trigger.
In the half second when the flash of ignited gunpowder cast the room into a stark light, she saw the yellow-haired visage of James Klodd standing in the doorway, with his scalloped brows and mismatched eyes. The mound of clothing he had emerged from was scattered at his feet and there was a machine gun in his hands.
Then, darkness. He was a shadow again and she heard her bullet punch into the wall. It had missed him by less than a foot.
Something hard crashed against her temple. Too late, she realized it was the stock of the machine gun. She struggled to get the pistol pointed at him again, but he was against her now, his clammy skin radiating with the same reeking odor as the pile of clothes he’d been hiding under.
The machine gun clattered against her foot as it fell and his hands seized her wrists. They spun in the light from the hallway. He was a spindly, pale specimen. But his mismatched eyes were full of a malignancy that was echoed in his unyielding grip. She heaved away but he held on. Her hands turned to fists and the pistol spat a bullet into the ceiling.
“I didn’t do anything,” he pleaded, even while his face bent and wrinkled with rage.
“You killed a child!” she shouted right back.
She was struggling against him with everything she had, but his grip only grew tighter. She felt her back strike the cement corner of the doorway. He shoved his weight at her and they fell backwards into the hallway. She felt her head cushioned as she struck the ground and, horrified, she knew she was sprawled across Joe Link’s body.
James Klodd let go of her right wrist and she saw why. She had dropped the pistol. In a flash, he retrieved it from the floor. His right hand twisted down on her left wrist and with his other hand he pointed the pistol at her face.
But she did not stare at the opening in the end of the barrel.
Issabella stared past it, past James Klodd.
Darren was standing in the doorway.
“James Klodd!” he shouted.
Reggie’s eyes widened with recognition. His lips trembled and he looked like he was going to say something as he turned to see the face of the man he had tormented for years.
He never did. As soon as he had half turned away from Issabella, Darren raised his gun and fired a single shot through Reggie’s head. He did not flail away. His head simply jerked once and then he sagged down to the floor, dead.
Issabella kicked at his body and was scrambling backwards crablike, desperate to get away from him. But then Darren was there. He reached under her, scooped her into the air, and pulled her away.
Time became a series of snapshots as the terror and rage that had fueled her fight with James Klodd struggled with the relief that was trying to vie for dominance. One moment he was guiding her up the stairs. The next they were in the hallways of the first floor. Darren was saying something, but she couldn’t comprehend it. Her head was a swirling nest of conflicting emotions.
When they were in the marble-floored foyer, she felt him draw them both to a halt. She followed his eyes.
The narrow glass windows on either side of the front doors were shot through with strobing red and blue lights. They poured and danced across the foyer walls as an unknown number of vehicles came to a stop in the circular turnaround outside. She heard boots hit the asphalt and car doors slamming shut.
“Stay here,” he told her, and she felt no particular need to argue.
His gun held down behind his thigh and out of view, Darren opened one of the doors and leaned his head out.
A man’s deep, authoritative voice shouted, “Oakland County Sheriff!”
She saw Darren sag with relief against the door. He looked around at her and, as exhausted as he looked, he shot her a crooked smile.
“Is it over?” she said.
Darren tossed the gun away. It clattered across the marble tile and he was pulling her to him. As she wrapped her arms around his neck, he held her with a desperate urgency. He buried his face in her hair, then leaned down and kissed her. When the kiss ended, he planted another on her cheek, her nose, her forehead.
Behind him, two uniformed deputies stepped into the threshold.
“It’s over,” Darren said.
Chapter Eighteen
More emergency vehicles streamed onto the property. More strobing lights appeared and lit the front of the mansion and the circular turn around as bright as early morning.
Issabella sat upright on a gurney behind an ambulance and sighed with relief when the young paramedic with her hair pulled back in a ponytail finally accepted that she was refusing transport.
“I’m not injured. I’m not going anywhere.”
She was left with a cold pack for the irritated spots on her face where the airbag had burnt her. She squeezed the pack until the chemicals inside were released. When it had grown cold in her hands, she tenderly pressed it against the side of her head where James Klodd had struck her with the stock of his machine gun.
AK-47, she thought.
She hadn’t mentioned the goose egg swelling beneath her hair to the paramedic, for fear she would have been piled into the back of the ambulance and whisked away. She wasn’t leaving. Not alone.
Sheriff’s deputies streamed in and out of the mansion. Crime scene technicians appeared and hauled their boxes of gear inside. She watched the ponytailed paramedic stop and exchange a quick word with one of the few plainclothes cops.
He was a tall, older guy with shaggy gray hair and an off the rack suit. When the paramedic spoke to him, his eyes slid over to Issabella and he nodded.
A notebook and pen appeared in his hands when he stepped up to her.
“She says you won’t go get checked out. You sure?”
“I’m not leaving. Look, I told one of the other officers—”
“I’m a detective, ma’am.”
“—and I’m telling you: there are dangerous men on their way here, I think.”
“Maybe there were,” he agreed. “But we have that road barricaded on both ends. Even dangerous men tend to turn around and go the other way when they see a wall of cops blocking their path. You’re safe, alright?”
She didn’t answer him. Her head was racing with competing concerns and she couldn’t hold onto any single one of them. No, that wasn’t true. There was one concern that was paramount over all others.
The detective followed her gaze as she looked off toward the yard beyond the edge of the house. His expression softened and he said, “Your boyfriend? He’ll be right back.”
“I know he will,” she said and forced herself to look at the cop. It was difficult. She wanted to walk away from him, then to run, and not to stop until she was beside Darren again. Not because she was scared. She wasn’t, not anymore. Of course the Senator’s men weren’t coming, not when the entirety of the county’s sheriff’s office was occupying the estate.
She wanted to be beside Darren, right then, right that moment, because she knew she needed to tell him a truth she’d kept from him. And after what they’d both experienced down in the bloody basement together, the idea of an unspoken secret betwee
n them seemed somehow obscene.
“Okay. So are you fine with me asking a few more questions? I know I’m probably the third or fourth guy to do this to you...”
“Second,” she said. “The other detective got pulled away to go with Darren.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to go over again about this Luther fellow.”
“I don’t know where he is,” she said and shrugged her shoulders. “He was running after me but never caught up. Maybe he stayed with the car. Did you check the car?”
The Detective’s expression turned cagey and he chewed at his bottom lip.
“See, we found a few bits of plastic where you say the...accident...happened. But no car.”
“Excuse me?”
“No car, ma’am. A Lexus you said? Black?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s gone. We sent a cruiser out to do a wide circle of all the adjoining roads. But there’s no sign of it.”
Issabella put her face down into her hands.
“Ma’am? Are you alright?”
“I’m going to scream.”
He didn’t seem to know what to say to that, but after a few moments of mentally assassinating Luther Fletcher, she straightened back up and managed to keep her composure intact. He looked relieved and said, “I wouldn’t fret over it if I was you. You’re alive and so is your friend. It’s just a car, after all.”
She thought about the steel suitcase inside the trunk, and the piles of evidence inside the suitcase, all of it growing further and further away with each passing second.
“Yep,” she said under her breath. “Just a car.”
“We’ll find him, ma’am.”
“Yep.”
A uniformed deputy several feet away called out and the detective turned. Issabella followed him with her eyes.
Around the corner of the estate, three paramedics appeared. Two of them were guiding the ends of a gurney over the lawn while the third was holding an IV bag in the air. Its tube was connected to Carmen, who was lying atop the gurney. Her eyes were closed.
The detective muttered, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and jogged over to the paramedics as they began loading Carmen into the back of an ambulance.
Darren appeared from around the same corner of the house. He had his suit coat slung over one shoulder as he crossed the distance between them. When he came to stop in front of her, she could see a large dark stain on his suit coat. She didn’t ask what it was. She’d seen enough blood that night to know.
“She’s got a good chance, I think,” he said. “Why are you still here? Why didn’t they take you to the hospital?”
“I was waiting for you.”
Darren smiled and he looked at her like he was making up his mind about something.
“What?” she said.
“A week. You get a week’s grace period before I will begin reminding you that running back inside that house was the single stupidest thing you have ever done in your life.”
“Ugh. I’m not arguing that. It’s stipulated too. You don’t have to even say it ever again.”
“I’ll probably say it several more times.”
“You went back in, too!”
“I had to.”
She knew that was true. Even as Luther had driven her away from him, she had known Darren had no choice but to go back and find James Klodd. There would never have been a moment’s peace in his soul if he hadn’t made the attempt.
“Luther’s gone,” she said. “And the Lexus. And the suitcase.”
Darren’s fond grin became a hard, straight line. She watched him wrestle with the implication the way she had. She thought he might begin to shout, as she almost had. The moment passed. His expression calmed. He straightened his shoulders and stared off down the driveway and he looked unexpectedly serene.
“James Klodd is dead,” he said. “You’re alive and so am I. Luther is the authorities’ problem now. Two of his people are dead. Another, if she pulls through, might have a lot to say about Luther and the Fletcher Group and Senator Chalmers. When he surfaces, a lot of agencies will be there waiting to put the hard questions to him. It isn’t our concern anymore. I can lay that burden down, I think.”
She could see it was the truth. The only concern he seemed to own in that moment was for her. His eyes lingered on the cold pack, on the slight burns from the airbag. He looked ready to open his mouth and order her into an ambulance.
“I have something to confess,” she said.
“No you don’t.”
“Darren.”
“You know who killed Gil Sharps,” he said. “You knew when you called me and told me to come down to the bar. And you kept it from me. You tore Chelsea’s name off that page of paper so I wouldn’t see it.”
Issabella said, “Yes. Darren, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Izzy. Be furious, like me. Luther bribed her to throw the Klodd case. Everything she’s said and done for me since has been couched in that lie. Her friendship. Her sage counsel. All crap. All more lies stacked on top of the first one.”
“Luther told you that?”
“Yeah. He came clean toward the end,” he said, and he looked suddenly wistful. “It doesn’t excuse all the other things he’s done, I know that. But he was trying to save my life when he bought her.”
Darren snapped to and looked at her with mild consternation.
“Hold on. How did you know it was Chelsea? I mean, a name on a list of bribed officials is one thing. But killing Gil Sharps is another. I only figured it out when I realized that she’d had Dan Finch frisk me so he could pickpocket the suitcase key.”
Issabella hadn’t known that. She told him what she did know.
“Getting assigned to Theresa’s case,” she said. “Utterly unorthodox and probably even jurisdictionally improper. She had zero reasons to do that. And no notice. How did she know that Theresa had been charged in the first place? It was the first docket of the morning and she’d only been arrested a few hours before. But by the time I got to the arraignment, Chelsea was substituted in as the district court judge on Theresa’s case. Then when I opened Gil’s file and saw her name and the bank accounts and cash...I just knew. She’d gotten assigned to Theresa’s case because she killed Gil. She killed him and she’d probably been monitoring every arrest all night, waiting to hear if anyone found his body. As soon as Theresa was charged, she did whatever she had to do to get put on the case.”
Darren seemed to agree with everything she’d laid out. When she was done, he stuck out his hand to shake.
“Um, what are you doing?”
“Congratulating you, Izzy. You solved Gil’s murder before I did. You won the game.”
She giggled as she shook his hand and one of the passing deputies looked at them askance before continuing on his way.
“So, what’s next?” she said. “I mean, once they let us go home. And after I take three showers. I’m going to lay down in the tub and not get out until this entire top layer of my skin has sloughed off. But after that, what do we do?”
“We still have a friend with a bogus murder charge hanging over her, kid. Maybe we should spend time on that.”
“Probably so. We are supposed to be lawyers, after all.”
“That’s what the diplomas say, anyway,” he agreed.
* * *
Luther drove the wheezing Lexus down empty country roads. He didn’t know where he was. He only knew that he was putting distance between himself and the disaster of that night.
The engine clattered and whined.
He saw Issabella running on the road, fleeing from him. Running as fast as she could manage.
Luther scowled in the darkness of the car’s interior and tried to force the image out of his mind.
He could have caught up to her. He knew that. He could have kept his word.
Luther juiced the accelerator and told himself to stop, to focus on what lie ahead and not what he’d left behind.
“I have to go back,” Darren had said, holding Luther by the arm and staring into his eyes with a desperate intensity. “I have to go back. And you have to keep her safe, Luther. I love her. Do this one thing for me.”
He rolled his window down and let the night air roll over him. He yanked at his tie until it hung loose. He struggled to breathe.
“I promise, Darren.”
And in that moment, he’d seen a hint of a possibility in his brother’s grateful eyes. It was the possibility of some measure of reconciliation. The briefest of suggestions in the way Darren’s face softened before he turned away and Luther got into the car in his stead.
Gone now. Gone for good.
If he’s alive. But Luther cut that train of thought off as swiftly as he could. That way lie a guilt he could not confront. Darren was alive. Issabella was alive. Any other consideration was out of the question.
He took a random turn and drove on, utterly disinterested in where he was going, so long as he kept moving and did not stop.
Now and then, throughout that long and solitary drive, he would glance to his right at the steel suitcase and its contents, and he’d feel a little bit better.
* * *
Thirty-six and a half hours after seeing her first dead guy behind Theresa’s bar, Issabella fired up her office computer. The goose egg on her head had already begun to go down, and pink spots on her face from the air bag were easily handled with a light touch of foundation.
She had made good on her promise to excessively bathe.
She had slept.
Now, she was ready to work.
She started to type, but stopped almost immediately. A singular question had formed in her head, with an insistence that demanded she address it.
How did Judge Hodgens or Deputy Finch know Darren would have the key or that he would even know about the key?
A Devil's Bargain Page 23